[Music] roald dahl is known to generations of children as the man that brought them magical stories like charlie and the chocolate factory danny the champion of the world and james and the giant peach many people remember his stories from their childhood um i've got a few favorites there's um matilda the witches james and the giant peach they're so fantastic and different it's like going into another world and i used to read a lot of roads when i was little and i had a lot of roald dahl read to me by my my parents he's very funny he's a very witty author he makes good stories for children and for adults the bfg and the big friendly giant was about the big monster and he he goes around catching dreams i can't even remember like my dog at that book i've taught roald dahl two children i read four or five of his books and the ones that i taught were danny champion of the world um which i think is probably my favorite of all these books but they're great children's books children's love children love them and it's great to be able to teach them to two children who want to learn who want to know and he's great man i love his books i think they're great he invented his own words and he wrote about fantastic places and people by the end of the 20th century people had bought over 35 million copies of his books [Applause] at the roald dahl museum and story center you can learn more about him and his world gemma holland works at the center she explains why dahl's stories are still popular today i think that the children still find the same things funny as they found funny 50 years ago and i think that rolda had a really amazing way of being able to reach the children but also be able to reach the adults that were reading with the children so the humor isn't just for the child but it's also for the parents or the adult reading with that child and i think that is a massive appeal as well for for everybody roald dahl's parents were norwegian but they had left norway to live in wales before rolled was born on the 13th of september 1916. dahl wrote about his childhood in his autobiography boy he told many stories about being naughty at school when he was only nine years old roald's mother sent him to boarding school a long way from home he was terribly homesick and he wrote her letters nearly every day although he was lonely and unhappy his letters were always cheerful and full of stories and school wasn't all bad a chocolate company sometimes sent new suites for students to test this gave rold a lifelong love of chocolate and became the inspiration for charlie and the chocolate factory roald dahl absolutely loved chocolate and whenever he ate them instead of just throwing the wrappers away he actually kept them and he would scrunch them all together to make a silver ball and he actually kept that ball as a little souvenir on his desk next to him when he roped [Music] roald wasn't the best student at school but he was always good at sport and he enjoyed adventure he didn't go to university after he finished school instead he started working for an oil company they sent him to africa then world war ii broke out and roald dahl saw this as another part of an adventure so he actually joined the royal air force and he became and learned to fly a plane and he actually flew a variety of different planes tiger moths hurricanes gladiators and unfortunately roald dahl was actually involved in quite a serious accident when he crashed his plane in the desert and he was very badly injured and all of that adventure actually led to his first ever published piece of writing and it was called shot down over libya by this time dahl already knew how to tell a great story he wrote a dramatic report about his accident while he was recovering in the united states he described how the germans had shot him down but really he had crashed because he had run out of fuel dahl had moved to the united states in 1942. [Music] he was working as a tv presenter when he met his wife patricia neal she was a film star they married in 1953 and moved back to england the couple lived in the small town of great missindon and they had five children [Music] by the 1960s he had become a very successful short story writer at this time most of his stories were for adults then the first story that he wrote for children was called the gremlins and it was all about little creatures that got inside the engines of planes and caused them to crash and break down and it was after that story and after the success of that story that he started writing stories for children including those famous ones such as james and giant peach and then obviously charlie in the chocolate factory [Music] millions of children have heard or read the stories of roald dahl but at the roald dahl story center they encourage young people to write their own stories gemma explains i think storytelling is important because it helps to make life more interesting around the museum there are lots of things to inspire young writers so how did writers like dahl turn their ideas into a story roald dahl always wrote his ideas down in his ideas books that he kept with him at all times and he actually had some ideas in his notebook for 20 years before he used them and dahl always wrote in the same way he always wrote in his writing hut and i'm sitting in his replica chair right now and we're surrounded by lots of really interesting things that he kept in his writing heart dahl always wrote with a pencil so he would sharpen six of them and then he would sit down to write on his special yellow paper everything he did he wrote by hand he would write for two hours every morning and then he would stop lunch and then he would write for two hours every afternoon as well roald dahl died in 1990 at the age of 74. one of the last lines he wrote was those who don't believe in magic will never find it i think that's a lovely way to finish off his last book basically saying that if you believe in magic you will find it and i think storytelling definitely helps us to keep that magic alive