Cirrus@Austlit

Storyteller, writer and director, Richard Tulloch is the son of Ian and Cecily (nee Dean) Tulloch. He studied law and education in Melbourne before living for two years in Europe where he began writing plays. Returning to Australia, he worked as an actor, associate director of the National Theatre Company, and writer in Perth before moving to Sydney. He was artistic director of the Toe Truck Theatre, Sydney, which performed for children. In addition to his many picture books and novels for children he has written plays and adaptations of other writers' works, and the screenplay for the animated feature Fern Gully II: The Magical Rescue. He was a co-creator of the popular children's television programme, Bananas in Pyjamas and has written episodes of Playschool and The Magic Mountain. He is popular as a storyteller and has performed in theatres and festivals, in Australian schools and in over 30 international schools around the world. In 2004 he was appointed the first May Gibbs Fellow of the Faculty of Education, Humanities, Law & Theology at Flinders University.

In a statement for Contemporary Authors Online (Gale database), Tulloch said, 'I became a writer by accident. During my unemployed time I wrote some short stories for very young children and submitted them to a radio programme called Kindergarten. Most of my stories were rejected but enough were accepted to give me some encouragement. My son, Bram, was then about a year old. I tried in these early stories to see things from his point of view. Things which an adult may take little interest in - a line of ants on the kitchen floor, the garbage a dog has pulled from a bin in the street, a broken mug - could be fascinating for a little boy, and gave me ideas for stories.'