HERE’S THE WILD AND wacky story of how the rat got revenge on the cat. There are also lots of other yucky and hilarious stories like Pinky Ponky the Shonky and Wonky Bonky Donkey. They’re all written with infectious rhymes and irresistible rhythms—so you’ll find yourself repeating lines long after you’ve finished the book. You might call it poetry, but it’s nothing like the poems you’re used to at school.
Andy Griffiths
Andy Griffiths is one of Australia’s funniest, successful and most versatile writers. He is the author of fifteen books ranging from nonsense verse, short stories, comic novels, creative writing textbooks as well as a parent’s guide for creating a healthier lifestyle for their children.
His books include the extremely popular Just! series of short stories, which has sold over two million copies world wide and been adapted as a television cartoon series called What’s with Andy? (currently in its third season) and the New York Times bestselling comic novels The Day My Bum Went Psycho, Zombie Bums from Uranus and Bumageddon: The final pongflict. His other books, all illustrated by Terry Denton, include the children’s choice award-winning favourite The Bad Book, The Cat on the Mat is Flat and most recently, an “arsetounding” illustrated guide to prehistoric bumosaur life, What Bumosaur is That?
The Cat on the Mat is Flat arose as a direct result of Andy and Terry’s collaboration on the Just! series. In this series, Terry’s illustrations were entirely limited to the margins, providing a chaotically humorous lateral commentary on the text. As the series progressed, however, the cartoons increasingly began to invade the page and Andy and Terry began to plan a book in which the text was drastically reduced and the marginal humour turned into the main event. Their first attempt was 2004’s The Bad Book, which, while clearly not to everybody’s taste, was awarded four children’s choice awards the following year. One of their favorite pieces in The Bad Book was a ‘bad’ poem called ‘Ed and Ted and Ted’s bad dog Fred’ which consisted entirely of a single sound rhyme. They used a rewritten version of this piece as the starting point for The Cat on the Mat is Flat, which is constructed entirely out of single sound rhymes. Combined with looser, pencil drawn illustrations the book has proven to be a read aloud favourite with both younger readers and their parents.
Andy’s books are published in Australia, the US, the UK, Brazil, Russia, China, Hungary and Romania. Andy is currently working on a sixth Just! book called Just Shocking!, a follow up to The Cat on the Mat is Flat with Terry called The Big Fat Cow That Went Kapow, and Just Macbeth!: an adaptation of Macbeth for the Bell Shakespeare Company’s Bardistic Adventures programme which is taking Shakespeare’s work to children as young as five.
