After watching TV until the wee hours of the morning, Amy finally drags herself to bed. When her family calls her for breakfast, she's still fast asleep. What's more, she's impossible to wake up! Then Amy's brother has a brilliant idea - why not carry Amy to school in her bed?!
In 1995, Munsch got a letter from Amy's mother about how hard it was to get Amy out of bed. She had even tried to wake Amy up by standing her on her feet, and Amy just fell over and went to sleep on the floor. One day Amy's mother said maybe she should take Amy to school in her bed! Amy thought that was a really funny idea that would make a great Robert Munsch story. So Amy and her mother each wrote him a letter about it. After reading them, he wrote Get Out of Bed!, sent it back to Amy and then forgot about it. In 1998, his editor came across the story and they decided to make it into a book.
After the book was done, Amy invited Munsch to the Fall Fair in her hometown of Tavistock, Ontario. Her family had made a float for the parade. The float had Amy in her bed, with the bed on a hay wagon. Munsch sat beside Amy reading her a book and lots of her friends were there in their pyjamas yelling "AMY! GET OUT OF BED!" Amy's float won first prize.
Robert Munsch is Canada's bestselling author. Long before he started writing books, he was a storyteller. The first time he told his stories to a group of children was in 1972, when he was a student teacher at their nursery school. The children liked his stories, so he started telling them more often. He would often take the same story and tell it again and again, changing it a little bit each time, until it got to be really good. Kids liked how loud and animated he was while he told them stories, so he kept doing that, too. This would become his signature storytelling style.
Eventually, once his stories got really, really good, he wrote them down and sent them to a publisher. The publisher said “Yes!” to the story that became the book Mud Puddle. Today, more than 50 Robert Munsch books have been published. Some, like Love You Forever, became runaway international bestsellers. Some, like The Paper Bag Princess and Zoom!, challenge conventions and stereotypes. But nearly ALL of them are based on real kids that Robert Munsch has met, often on his tours and travels. Sometimes, as in Finding Christmas and Pyjama Day!, he even uses his own family. Each book is dedicated to the kid or kids it is based on. You can find out more about the story behind each book by clicking on the “About this story” buttons on this website.
While Robert Munsch has countless fans across North America (he receives about 10,000 letters a year!) his books are also popular around the world. They have been translated into over 20 languages, from Arabic to Swedish, including several First Nations languages. Robert Munsch has received many awards for his work as an author and storyteller. He has a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame, the Order of Canada, and a school named in his honour!
Robert Munsch was even once a kid himself. He grew up in a large family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Now that he’s grown up and has (grown-up) kids of his own, he lives with his wife in Guelph, Ontario, where you can often find him on long walks with his dog.
Alan and Lea Daniel Husband and wife team paint together in their house in Kitchener, Ontario. Their own children, pets, friends and furniture often appear in their illustrations. They have illustrated several books for Scholastic, including the Robert Munsch titles Get Out of Bed! and Aaron's Hair. They were nominated for the Governor General's Award for Illustration for their book Sody Salleratus.
