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Several of Wilson’s most famous characters, including Tracy Beaker, are children who have difficult childhoods. Wilson’s own was not as dramatic as those she writes about, but it wasn’t happy. “It wasn’t a terribly sad, deprived childhood, and there were some happy times, but my parents hated each other,” she says. “There were endless rows.” She describes her mother as a “snob” who didn’t like her daughter telling people they lived on a council estate and says her parents caused her great anxiety. “Even on holiday you never knew when one of them would trigger the other.” Her parents eventually divorced when Wilson was an adult. She jokes that she may not have found one of the repeated themes of her books if not for her parents: “Really, I should be extremely grateful.”

The TV adaptation of The Story of Tracy Beaker

2. She’s writing a sequel to the first book she loved

Wilson has been a passionate reader since before she could even read. As a small child she was given books to keep her quiet, but she couldn’t read the words so would sit and make up her own stories while staring at the pages. Her mum forced the local library to let her join before she was old enough to do so – “She stormed in and said, ‘Look, the kid loves reading and we can’t keep buying books’, so they let me join.” The first book she read by herself was The Enchanted Wood by Enid Blyton. Many years later, Wilson has written her own entry in the series, The Magic Faraway Tree: A New Adventure. “I’ve been very respectful to her original characters, but I’ve invented my own and my own magic lands. Who gets that chance to relive a childhood fantasy and have that secret world become real?”

3. Social realism drama inspired her

Wilson names two projects as key to her development as a writer, both of which she saw when she was far too young. In the 1950s, she watched Mandy, a film by Alexander Mackendrick, about a deaf girl whose needs cause tension in her family. “It’s very much an adult film about a girl who’s deaf and whose parents can’t agree how she should be treated,” she says. “What I think I didn’t realise at the time… is it’s made from the child’s point of view”, a key theme in her work. The second project was the play A Taste of Honey, by Shelagh Delaney, about a pregnant teenager. “It’s about a character who’s sensitive but quite fierce, the sort of character I’m really interested in.”

When Wilson had the idea to write about a girl growing up in foster care, she wanted her to have a distinctive name. She was thinking about it while having a bath. “I thought Tracy, which is not so popular now but was quite a popular name more than 30 years ago,” she says. “I thought that was quite bouncy… I wanted the surname to be something that would stick in people’s minds.” She looked around the bathroom for inspiration. “Tracy Tap. Tracy Flannel. Tracy Soap. Then I got on with washing my hair. At the time, I didn’t really have much money and I was washing my hair with an old Snoopy beaker. And I thought, Tracy Beaker. I don’t know why, but suddenly that seemed the right name.”

5. Her mother used to keep a secret gun

Wilson says she sometimes dreams of “having one of the real bestsellers, right up the top of the charts. Unfortunately, the only thing I could ever think of was to tell my mum’s story, which is quite extraordinary.” Although married, her mother used to have a number of “fancy men”, who Wilson was terrified her schoolfriends would find out about. She also tells a story of visiting her mother in her later years. “She said, ‘I’ve got something wonderful. I keep it under my pillow’… I looked and it was a [loaded] gun.” She was eventually persuaded to get rid of it. “She was a strange woman,” says Wilson.

6. The magazine Jackie was named after her

Before Wilson became an author she worked in magazines. One of those was the extremely popular teen magazine Jackie. “I contributed some stories for them and various other magazines…They hadn’t actually brought out [Jackie] yet,” she says. “Senior management of all the women’s and girls’ magazines called me in and said, ‘We’re going to call it Jackie… after you.” Wilson modestly says she’s not sure if they were just saying it to be kind, “but it makes a good story”.

In the early 2000s, Wilson was asked to write something to help The Foundling Museum, a children’s charity set up in memory of Thomas Coram, who established a home for children at risk of abandonment. Wilson came up with Hetty Feather, the story of a girl helped by the Foundling Hospital in Victorian times. Wilson says she finds stories set in the past easier to write. “It’s easier for me because I don’t have to keep up with social media. I don’t have to keep up with the very latest way young people talk… I’m free to write what I want.”

The TV adaptation of Hetty Feather

8. She worries that people are losing “reading stamina”

When Wilson was young, she would read all sorts of books. She has concerns that popular books for children are now very simple. “Children are so used to watching things they like to watch and if they’re at all bored they will flip to something else,” she says. She thinks something similar happens with books now. “A lot of children’s books that are good and popular are quite slight. You can read them quite quickly. There’s no real depth to them. I don’t think that hurts at all, but I’m a firm believer that you’ve got to develop reading stamina. It’s not always instant gratification. I think you have to get it across to children… don’t just immediately, after the first paragraph, say ‘Boring’. Carry on.”

9. She can’t stop writing

Wilson has written over 100 books, sold over 40 million copies in the UK alone and been translated into 30 languages. Despite achieving so much, she has no plans to stop. In fact, she can’t. “Because I got so used to writing and have done since I was a child… I would miss it.” She’s tried to take breaks from it. “Sometimes I say, ‘I’ll take a fortnight off’. Then after the second day I’ve got to have a little bit of writing. I can’t help myself.”

Listen to Jacqueline Wilson on This Cultural Life