Allan Ahlberg was born in Croydon in 1938. From the age of twelve, his dream was to be a writer. Before he fulfilled his ambition, he tried his hand at a variety of other jobs including postman, grave digger, plumber's mate and teacher. He met his wife, Janet at Sunderland training to be a teacher. They married in 1969. Janet decided against teaching as a career and turned instead to graphic design. Janet began urging Allan to write a text for her to illustrate, and so the pair began to build a illustrator-writer relationship. By the 1980s, the Ahlbergs were big news, not just in Britain but all around the world. Their books were translated into twenty-one languages, but it was The Jolly Postman, published in 1986, that brought Janet and Allan their greatest success. It won many awards including the Kate Greenaway Medal and the Emil/Kurt Maschler Award, and sales of over five Million copies worldwide for The Jolly Postman and its successors, The Jolly Christmas Postman and The Jolly Pocket Postman. Allan also went on to write a range of fiction titles for older children, including Woof!, The Bear Nobody Wanted, The Giant Baby and The Better Brown Stories.
