Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has taken time out of his busy schedule to indulge his imagination by penning a children's book featuring his family pets, a spokeswoman said Sunday.

Rudd -- who is so famed for his jet-setting work ethic he has been nicknamed "Kevin 707" by the local press -- wrote the book with Australian children's television star Rhys Muldoon, his spokeswoman told reporters.

Titled "Jasper and Abby and the Great Australia Day Kerfuffle", the book follows Rudd's pet cat and dog on an adventure through the grounds of The Lodge, his family's official residence in the capital, Canberra.

"It's delightful, it's actually very very cute, even cuter than one might imagine," the spokeswoman said.

"Jasper in the flesh is very hoity-toity, in a good cat way, and Abby's gorgeous. They're old family pets, much beloved."

The book will be released on the January 26 Australia Day holiday, which commemorates the landing of the first fleet on Australian shores in 1788. Some profits from the sale of the book will go to children's charities, the spokeswoman said.

The Mandarin-speaking former diplomat Rudd jokingly told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper he had wanted to beat his novelist daughter Jessica into print, and it "wasn't the most demanding" text he had ever worked on.

"It's good to put a more human face on them," he said of his much-loved pets, who he claimed to have interviewed for the story with Muldoon.

(Read by Renee Haines. Renee Haines is a multimedia journalist at the China Daily Web site.)

(Agencies)