Happy Birthday Roald Dahl!

Today is Roald Dahl day - and this year, the celebrations are jumpsquifflingly huge, because it's 100 years since the writer's birth on 13th September, 1916.

Not only was Dahl one of the greatest children's writers of all time, he was also a spy, a fighter-pilot, a medical inventor and recipe deviser, and his two excellent and entertaining autobiographies, Boy and Going Solo are highly recommended, if you haven't read them already.

In addition to his books for children, Dahl wrote several celebrated collections of twisted short stories with a sting in the tail, his Tales of the Unexpected.

He also dabbled in film. Besides working on the big-screen version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, he wrote the script for the fifth James Bond film You Only Live Twice, and for children's classic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Both were based on Ian Fleming's original novels, but Dahl was happy to throw away Fleming's plots and introduce his own material instead: the Child-Catcher, for instance, in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, is entirely Dahl's invention.

Find out how much you know about Roald Dahl here, or take a quiz to discover which Roald Dahl character you most resemble.  The Roald Dahl Oxford Dictionary has just been published, celebrating the phizz-wizzing and occasionally biffsquiggling gobblefunk (language) he invented: test yourself on gobblefunk vocab with the BBC's quick gobblefunk quiz.

The BBC have also produced a selection of short talks about Dahl, including one by the The League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson on his formative early encounters with the dark and often disturbing world of Dahl's adult fiction: you can download them as podcast here.  If you want to find out more about what Dahl was like as a person, try this affectionate tribute written by his grand-daughter, Sophie. 

To celebrate all things Dahlian, the book blog is running a poll, giving you the chance to vote for your favourite Roald Dahl book. The poll is on the right if you're reading this on a tablet or computer: if you're reading the blog on your phone, you need to scroll down to the bottom and click 'see web version'.  Vote now - the poll closes at 16.30 on Wednesday.