Jacqueline Wilson versus JK Rowling.

No wizards, no spells, just gritty reality But this is the author who is taking on JK Rowling.

Manic depression, homelessness, violent step-dads and youngsters in care - it's hardly the subject matter you'd expect to read in pre-teen fiction. Here, bestselling children's writer Jacqueline Wilson talks about her life and explains why she chooses to write as she does

When Jacqueline Wilson walks into a room full of children they crowd around, greeting her like an old friend and demanding her autograph. Put her into a room of adults, however, and no one knows this petite, spiky grey-haired, 58-year-old woman. It's as if she puts on a magic cloak. As a bestselling children's author - second only to JK Rowling - she transforms into a teenager, writ
ing with uncanny understanding of what it's like to be a young girl facing up to life in the post-nuclear family unit. And then there's Jacqueline Wilson the grown up, married at 19, divorced 30 years later, enjoying her freedom and saving the funds from her 10 million book sales for a rainy day in a nursing home. With an OBE for 'services to literacy in schools', Jacqueline is a frequent visitor to classrooms around the country. Not only aoes she like to read to children, she likes being with them and the feeling is mutual.

Her funky elegance helps. She wears black 'nearly all the time' - particularly velvet - and pointy kinky boots. And then there are the rings: huge chunky silver ones, with stones as big as gobs toppers, on every finger. 'I love heavy, Gothic jewellery,' she says, 'and I have a ritual when I finish a book of buying a new ring. It's a good talking point when I meet children, too.' Jacqueline may look as if she should be writing Harry Potter stories - or even starring in one - but her style is full-on 21st century realism.

Her books are the kind that children love and adults hate, and when you look inside the cartoony, tutti-frutti front covers, it's easy to see why. The first-person writing is chatty and warm but the subject matter is usually dark: divorce, difficult parents, abandonment even teenage death - while

The Spectator has described her style as a 'benign empathy with young victims of family dysfunction'. Jacqueline can recall, in almost photographic detail, growing up as an only child in a neat council flat in Kingston, Surrey. 'I can picture the dreams I had, the dresses I wore, the dresses I didn't want to wear, everything. But if you asked me what I was doing last week I probably wouldn't remember. 'I was happy some of the time but I was slightly withdrawn. My parents went out to work, so I made up vivid imaginary games on my own. Because I often write about sad little creatures who get bullied, people think I, too, was picked on at school but, although I
wasn't queen of the classroom, I did have nice friends and I did enjoy myself It was as if I was leading two lives, though - in my imagination and as the person I was with my friends. I didn't tell them about my imaginary games because they'd think I was barking!' This vivid memory bank is a big clue to Jacqueline's ability to talk and think as a young person. But, as she acknowledges, her world was very different from that of children now.

Her parents stayed together until her father's death over 20 years ago. 'But I wouldn't say it was happy families,' she says. 'Back then you stayed together and struggled on. It wasn't at all a conventional, calm, suburban background.' Divorce was still a whisper behind the curtains, drugs and date rape unheard of and the secondary school Jacqueline attended had a repressively strict uniform code with a legion of prefects telling younger girls to straighten their ties and do their top buttons up. 'Heaven forbid,' she says, 'if you were ever caught not wearing your beret on the way home.' Now, in the rapidly changing techno, trainers and tattoo culture, she has to stay streetwise to sound authentic. But from an early point in her career, she's been tuned into the teenage mind and market. In fact, Jackie magazine - one-time oracle of makeup, music and meeting that boy - was named after her. How cool is that? After leaving school in the Sixties and desperate to write for a living,
Jacqueline managed to get a job at DC Thompson in Dundee, which published Bunty and the Beano.
'I was a shy girl from the London suburbs,' she explains, 'but I think the two old men who ran the company thought I was trendy because I was from swinging London and they told me they were going to name their new magazine after me.'

After two years of writing for Jackie and other teenage magazines, Jacqueline did 'a completely mad thing' and got engaged at the age of 19. She and her husband moved to London and less than two years later, their daughter Emma was born. 'I wouldn't necessarily recommend having a child so young,' she admits, 'but the good thing was that I had a lot of energy. I was like a big sister as well as a motherI loved playing little girl games with her. I think that's why we're so close.' Now in her late 30S, Emma lectures at Cambridge University.

During those early years of marriage, Jacqueline started writing novels. 'When my husband had gone to his 4.30am shifts [he was training as a police officer], I found that couple of hours a brilliant time for writing, since I was writing for magazines during the day to pay the bills.' Eventually Macmillan published her novel about two little girls getting kidnapped, as part of its crime list. 'I didn't want to write crime but they asked for more and, as I wanted to keep getting published, I went on to write five more.'

But her heart wasn't in the genre and by now she was desperate to write for children. In 1975, after endless refusals, her first children's book, Nobody's Perfect, was published by Oxford University Press. But the real change in Jacqueline's fortunes came in 1991 with The Story Of Tracy Beaker, a phenomenally successful book for pre-teens about a child in care, which has since been turned into a TV series. Jacqueline's books have now become essential reading for girls aged between seven and 14. Those for young teenagers include the quartet Girls In Love, Girls Under Pressure, Girls Out Late and Girls In Tears, which focuses on Ellie and her two friends Magda and Nadine as they discover boys, periods, weight and friendship. They also learn how to tell when you're ready for 'it'.
But she's insistent that it has never entered her head to sensationalise or capitalise on teenage behaviour. An angry father, who accosted her in a Cheltenham bookshop recently, didn't agree. He said he'd removed her books from his daughters' bookshelves because they were offensive, and accused Jacqueline of irresponsible storylines. 'I told him he had a perfect right to stop his children reading my books, but he kept saying I was making money out of exploiting children, and I was outraged at that,' she says. Her themes may be hard hitting, she adds, but her characters are engaging and fundamentally out to do the best they can for themselves, their friends and their families.

She's acutely aware of her responsibilities as a children's writer. 'Even though disturbing things happen in my books, there's no real swearing, nor are there long passages describing violence or sexual behaviour. And I always try to work things out to have a happy ending because I don't want children to be terminally depressed when they finish reading one of my books.

'But children avidly discuss the plots of gritty TV soaps and, whether we like it or not, they have a real appetite for reading about children under stress or pressure. I've had hundreds of thousands of letters from children and it's always the sadder, more serious books they enjoy the most.' Not surprisingly, Jacqueline gets nothing but praise from her young readers the 300 letters a week she receives are proof of that. She replies to each one of them herself often sitting up past midnight to do so. 'Whenever I think it's too much work, another one pops up from some little girl who's ill, who says reading my books made her laugh, and you just feel humbled.' The weird thing, she says, is that children know perfectly well that she's an adult but they seem to feel that lurking underneath the grey hair there's a 10year-old who understands them.

It wasn't long after her book sales took off astronomically that Jacqueline and her husband split up. They'd been together for more than 30 years. Did her sudden success have anything to do with their separation? 'Who's to say what makes marriages break up?' she says. 'Basically, my husband met somebody else, but I also think we both changed a lot over the years and were no longer suited. After my husband left, I was determined to work even harder because it helps to work hard and be distracted when you're feeling miserable.

'Being on my own was also good for me because I took up lots of new things. I thought, okay, now I'm on my own I need to fill all that time, so I took up line dancing, I started swimming in the mornings, I did a course on architecture and one on art history, and I made all sorts of new friends. I'm not saying that breaking up is a good thing but a lot of positive things did come out of it.' It was the start of what she calls her 'mad routine' - she's so busy she always carries a notebook and writes anywhere, from the train to the post office queue.

Newly single, Jacqueline's financial success couldn't have come at a better time, although the money has changed her life very little. She's set most of it aside, she says, 'in case I get completely dotty and need to go into a nursing home'. She doesn't own a car, preferring public transport, and still lives in her 'tumbledown little house' in Kingston, home for more than 25 years. The house is crammed to the rafters with her collection of 15,000 books - they fill the living room and the garage, and spill over into the rest of the house. 'I have no problem spending money on books or clothes,' she says, “but I can't  imagine myself living in a big, glossy house from  Hello! magazine - that's just not me”

She relishes this anonymity and is appalled at the idea of having a JK Rowling-style profile. 'When I'm around children I get showered in admiration  and attention, which is lovely, but when I'm with  adults no one has a clue who I am, so I can go to the supermarket, sit in the pub and lead a normal life I get the best of both worlds,' she says happily. Despite her slightly exotic appearance, Jacqueline  is quietly spoken and polite, although she wouldn't mind not always having to be so nice. 'It's the Blue  Peter syndrome: if you're involved with children publicly, you have to be careful about drinking in public and always be nice - people expect you to be  like a grown-up child!' Then there are the Sunday lunch parties where everyone expects her to do her 'Mary Poppins bit', as she calls it. 'Then I feel, well… I love kids but I don't want to be stuck all  afternoon chatting to the children and doing drawings with them - I like adult company, too.

But Jacqueline is in no doubt that the best experience of all is making children laugh. 'It's strange; adults say my books are sad but most children would say I write funny stories. The thing that gives me the biggest buzz of all is when I read aloud from my  books and the children fall about laughing. That just gives you such a fantastic feeling, it really does.