Peter Hepplewhite

Horrible Histories.

The former front cover of the Horrible Histories special France.
Author	Terry Deary; Peter Hepplewhite; Neil Tonge
Illustrator	Martin Brown; Philip Reeve; Mike Phillips
Cover artist	Martin Brown; Philip Reeve; Kate Sheppard
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Subject	Civilisations, nations, periods, and various cities throughout history
Genre	Children's; history
Publisher	Scholastic
Publication date	1993–2013

Horrible Histories is a series of illustrated history books published in the United Kingdom by Scholastic, and part of the Horrible Histories franchise. They are designed to engage children in history by presenting the unusual, gory, or unpleasant aspects in a tongue-in-cheek manner in contrast to the formality of lessons taught in school. The books are written by Terry Deary, Peter Hepplewhite and Neil Tonge and illustrated by Martin Brown, Mike Phillips, Phillip Reeve, and Kate Sheppard.

The first titles in the series, The Terrible Tudors and The Awesome Egyptians, were published in June 1993. As of 2011 with more than 60 titles in the series, the books have sold over 25 million copies in over 30 languages. The books have had tie-ins with newspapers such as The Telegraph, as well as audio-book tie-ins distributed with breakfast cereals.

Terry Deary studied at drama college and worked as an actor-teacher at the TIE company in Wales. He then became a theatre director and began to write plays for children. Many of his TIE plays were eventually rewritten and adapted into the Horrible Histories book series. Deary said "I was in this small touring company, taking plays for children round Welsh village halls. I did find I had this facility for knocking ideas into scripts".

After a particularly successful tour of a play called The Custard Kid, about a "cowardly cowboy", Deary decided he wanted to immortalise the production, so turned it into a book and sent it out to publishers. The 24th publisher agreed to publish the book by Deary, who was by now around 30 years old. By the time the idea of Horrible Histories was presented to him by his publisher, Deary had written around 50 children's novels. The Guardian explains, "they wanted a 'history joke book' and – when he protested that he knew nothing about history – offered to provide the facts to go with the gags". Deary explains the series' inception thus: "The publishers originally asked for a joke book with a history theme. They said, 'Put in a few interesting facts to break up the jokes because some of your jokes are very bad.' And when I looked at the facts, I found they were much more interesting than the jokes. So we ended up with a fact book with jokes. We created a new genre".