Jacqueline Wilson returns to Dolphin at Norwich Book Festival
Bestselling childrens writer Jacqueline Wilson is stepping back into one of her most loved worlds and shes bringing it to Norwich. This October, shell appear at the Norwich Book Festival (October 243, 2025) to talk about Picture Imperfect, a new adult novel that picks up the story of Dolphin from The Illustrated Mum, now grown up and facing the messier decisions of adult life. Its a special 16+ event designed for readers who grew up with Wilson and want to see where those characters landed.
The session will be chaired by Emma Healey, the Norwich-based author who studied at the University of East Anglia and is best known for Elizabeth Is Missing, which won the Costa First Novel Award. Healeys calm, curious style should suit a conversation about memory, legacy, and what it means to revisit old characters without simply repeating their past.
The festival describes itself as a city-wide celebration of stories, presented by The Forum with cultural partners across Norwich. Organisers are billing Wilsons appearance as a chance for grown-up fans to reconnect with a book that shaped them and to hear why its sequel now speaks to an older audience. Tickets are already on sale. There wont be a signing line after the talk, but pre-signed copies are available as part of ticket bundles for anyone who wants a keepsake without the wait.
For readers who followed Wilson in the 1990s and 2000s, the event lands in a sweet spot: familiar characters, fresh stakes, and a writer whos open about the risks of returning to a classic. Wilson has written more than 100 books and sold over 40 million copies worldwide, and shes no stranger to stories that sit with you long after school. She served as Childrens Laureate from 2005 to 2007 and was made a Dame in 2008. Shes also talked often about how she began writing stories at nine, which helps explain her knack for capturing the internal lives of young people and, now, the adults they become.
- Festival dates: October 243, 2025
- Event audience: 16+ (adult-only session)
- Chair: Emma Healey (UEA alumna, author of Elizabeth Is Missing)
- Signing: No post-event signing; pre-signed copies available in ticket bundles
- Presented by: The Forum with partners across Norwich
- Tickets: On sale now
From The Illustrated Mum to Picture Imperfect: what grows, what stays
Picture Imperfect finds Dolphin at 33, still feeling like a side character in the long shadow of her mothers story. Shes weighing big calls: whether to build a life with Lee, a steady gardener, or take a chance on a charming actor; whether to move north to Scotland to live near her successful sister; whether the person she is now fits the child she once had to be. The focus is identity in motion how you write your own script after growing up in a family where chaos wrote it for you.
Readers will remember The Illustrated Mum not just for its tattoos and grit but for its tenderness. Published in 1999, it followed Marigold, a tattoo-covered mother struggling with mental illness, and her daughters Star and Dolphin, who learned to cope, protect, and grow up early. The book won major prizes at the time and ended up on countless school reading lists because it refused to look away from hard truths while keeping faith with the girls resilience. Thats the emotional backdrop Wilson is revisiting, only now through the lens of adult choices rather than childhood survival.
Why return after 25 years? Wilson has said over the years that some characters keep talking in your head. For fans, that persistence matters. Children who first met Dolphin in classrooms and libraries are now navigating mortgages, blended families, and late-night doubts of their own. An adult sequel lets Wilson ask grown-up questions without sanding down the edges: what if your instincts were shaped by instability? What does love look like when youve learned to expect abandonment? Can you build a calm life without becoming someone you dont recognise?
Theres also the dynamic with Star, the older sister whose path has looked brighter from the outside. Moving to Scotland would mean safety and closeness, but also old patterns. Family success stories can be a comfort and a burden; Wilson knows how to write both. The novels tension isnt only romance versus independence; its the tug between rewriting the past and accepting the present.
Healey as chair is a smart match. Elizabeth Is Missing wove memory, identity, and care into a readable mystery and her later work, Whistle in the Dark, looked at the aftershocks of crisis within a family. Expect the conversation to probe how Wilson balances respect for the original with the need to let Dolphin surprise us. Also expect talk about voice: how do you move from a childs first-person urgency to an adults reflective, sometimes unreliable, point of view without losing momentum?
Wilsons broader legacy will hang over the evening in a good way. Tracy Beaker made foster care a household conversation. Hetty Feather pulled Victorian hardship into the present with bite. Those books earned trust because they didnt flinch. Picture Imperfect looks set to apply that same honesty to thirty-something life: career drift, messy dating, the pull of home, and the fear that youre still living inside an old story someone else wrote.
The Norwich Book Festival has framed this year as a celebration for every kind of reader, which fits this event. Its part reunion, part reckoning. For adults who once underlined passages in The Illustrated Mum or whispered about Marigold after lights out, this is a chance to see what time does to the characters who felt like friends and what it does to us, too.