Dav Pilkey speaks during the 2026 Auckland Writers Festival.
By any objective measure, he’s up there in the pantheon of children’s book authors with Rowling, Dahl, et al: the two series for which he’s most famous, Dog Man and Captain Underpants, together have 160 million copies in print. The Washington Post has called him a “rock star”. So it’s a surprise when Dav Pilkey says he still feels like he knows nothing.
Every time he travels overseas, Pilkey says, he sees brilliant children’s books by artists and writers he’s never seen or heard of before. “And every time I see that, I feel like I know nothing. You know what I mean? There’s just so much to learn. Even about illustrating. And as a writer, I’ve always felt it doesn’t come naturally to me. So, I feel like I’m just getting started.”
The struggles he faced in his path to the top of the world of children’s publishing are well-known and began with an inability to read: as a kid, he had dyslexia and what he now knows was ADHD, although back then nobody knew what that was. He says his teachers didn’t have the resources to deal with kids like him.
The result was a school experience marked by shame and misery. He was disruptive and was frequently sent out of class to sit in the hallway. It was there he began drawing the characters that would come to populate his bestselling books.
Pilkey prefers to call ADHD “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Delightful”, then adds that he doesn’t like the term “deficit” either, preferring to think of it as “dynamic attention” because of the power people with ADHD have to hyperfocus. It’s a power he says he puts to use every day in his own work, working in spells of six to eight hours, whether he feels inspired or not. It’s an alternative message about ADHD that he says is important for kids and parents to hear.
“A bunch of experts came up with that term and any time you get a bunch of experts together, you know they’re going to get it wrong. I feel like perhaps they were well-meaning, but maybe they didn’t get the full picture. I think there’s much, much more to it than meets the eye.”
The years from second grade to fifth grade were, he says, the worst of his life. He’d frequently come home crying, asking himself questions like, “Why me?” and “How come nobody else has these problems?”
He credits his mother with helping to turn his thinking around.
“She always believed that something good can come out of any situation if you just look for it. And that positivity rubs off after a while. So I started to behave like that and to ask those questions, like ‘How can I turn this into something good?’”
Each week, his mother would take him to the library and let him pick whatever books he wanted. There was zero judgment.
“It didn’t matter if the books were below my reading level or if I’d read them a million times already. She just wanted me to read what I loved and eventually I learned to love to read because I practised so much and because my mum was such a good support system.”
Now, as one of the world’s most successful authors, he tries to offer that same sort of support to the kids whose lives he touches in marathon meet and greets that can run as long as five hours. He sees it as his purpose to inspire kids who are struggling with reading, as he once did. He wants them to see it as fun. He hopes that by meeting someone else who struggled and turned out okay, they will feel less alone.
At a recent event, he says, he told a little girl who was struggling that she had a mum who loved her very much and she was going to be just fine. The girl started crying and so did her mother and so did he: “Everybody was crying,” he says. “But it was just a lovely thing. And that happens so much you wouldn’t believe it.”
He’s made peace with his past. He doesn’t begrudge the teachers who made his life so awful in those early school years. Given the chance to go back and change his experience, he says he wouldn’t.
“I wouldn’t change a thing, to be honest,” he says. “Those struggles helped me to become who I am.”
By most measures, there’s nothing left for him to achieve. But he’s not interested in most measures. When asked about his legacy, he doesn’t mention his sales or cultural significance or the hit shows and movies and other baubles of fame that have sprung from his books.
He says: “I hope that I have inspired a lot of kids to read and I hope that perhaps my art or my stories have inspired kids to create the way that so many artists have inspired me to create … I hope that I can be an inspiration to others in that way.”
Auckland Live presents Dog Man: The Musical at the Bruce Mason Centre, July 14-18. More information at aucklandlive.co.nz