Authors Electric

Karla Brading One of the best things about writing books for young readers is when a fan of your work starts writing books as well. From her very first letter to me, after she'd enjoyed my fantasy novel Spellfall , I knew Karla Brading was a born writer, possibly even a fellow fantasy author. Many letter exchanges later (and I mean real letters, written by hand on paper and posted into one of those shiny red letterboxes you see dotted around the place), and it became obvious she was highly creative too. Then one day a package dropped through my letterbox containing Karla's first novel. A vampire book, as I remember - it still sits proudly on my shelf among my signed copies. A few more years passed, and Karla now has a book deal with the highly-respected Welsh press Gomer for her latest novel  The Inn of Waking Shadows, which I had the privilege of reading at proof stage on my Kindle. This one is a ghost story for teens set in a haunted pub in Wales, and it'll send...

I have fond memories of Hay-on-Wye. I used to live in Ross-on-Wye, about 30 miles downriver of the now world-famous town of books, and often tackled the twisty rural roads through the glorious Herefordshire countryside to the Welsh border, all in the name of research. It's been about 25 years since my first visit to the town, back in the early 1990s. My friend Sue and I used to go to the Book Festival while it was still quite small, and the children's authors did their talks in the local primary school hall - or in its more modest classrooms, depending on their level of fame. One of the first children's events we attended was JK Rowling reading from an early Harry Potter in the school hall, where the organizers were clearly caught by surprise at the size of the audience and did well to squeeze everyone in. My friend and I stood in the doorway, trying not to feel too self-conscious among all the young fans squashed together on the floor. Afterwards, the signi...