When children's author Jacqueline Wilson walked on to the stage, she was greeted like a pop star.

Her audience of young (mainly) girls gave her the kind of rapturous reception you might expect Gareth Gates or Will Young to be met with.

Not a particularly tall woman, Wilson has a huge personality and, for the next hour, regaled us with tales of her childhood.

She told us the background to some of her stories and characters and let us into a few secrets - such as the nagging she used to get as a child from her own mum about her messy bedroom, which led to several of her stories being thrown away with the rest of the rubbish she failed to clear out when her mother carried out her threat of putting it out for the bin men.

And the game she plays with her lucky Sylvanian rabbit mascot, Radish, while sitting at her desk waiting for inspiration to strike.

Or how she colour matches her stories, using different coloured pens according to the type of story she's writing.

And how, even though she has had more than 70 books published and is one of the most successful children's writers around, each time she starts a new story, she fusses and frets about whether it will be any good and if anyone will like it.

She showed us the one surviving exercise book she used to write in as a child, often while perched on the edge of the bath behind a locked door - the only place she could find peace and quiet as her house-proud mother Hoovered their small flat and her father cheered on his horses on the telly.

Wilson wrote The Maggots when she was nine, about the big family she longed for herself.

The writing might not have been polished but it was clear, even then, she was creating the same kind of stories and characters she does now.

Jacqueline Wilson was warm, funny and endearingly frank, proving it is not only in the written form that she is one of our gifted communicators.

This was just as much a treat for the (mainly) mothers in the audience as their daughters.

Review by Kim Protheroe, kim.protheroe@theargus.co.uk