Authors Electric

Hunted cover by Elizabeth Kay I often use photographs I have taken myself for artwork in books because there are no copyright issues, and I do watercolours of them. For my reluctant reader,  Hunted , I used my own illustrations for the cover and to head every chapter. I have a strong interest in wildlife, and most of my holidays have been booked with this in mind. But what a difference the right camera makes. A week before I was due to go to the Pantanal, in Brazil, I went into our local camera shop to try and find out why I was not getting the quality I wanted with my Panasonic. I am not techie with cameras, and had always bought ones with good automatic settings. The shop owner, who knew me well, handed me a Nikon Coolpix P900 and said, “Go for a walk up the High street with this, take a few photos, and tell me what you think.” I returned with one word: Sold. It has an 83X zoom, and is very easy to use. That was seven years ago, and I have never wanted another camera. It is still...

The real thing My illustration of a lion It all started with a book I was given as a child, Animal Life of the World . It was published in 1934, and reflects the values and attitudes of the time. The photographs were all in black and white, and the chapter titles were quaintly imaginative. Little Bandits of our Hills and Hedgerows , Leather-sided Giants , Animals Verging on Extinction (the Thylacine was still going at this point), and The Big Cats . I must have been given this book before I could read, because initially I just looked at the pictures. The chapter entitled Big Game of Other Days (note the word game!) fascinated me, with its photographs of model iguanodons and megalosauruses in realistic swampy settings. I couldn’t tell the difference between them and a photograph of a live animal, and I assumed that dinosaurs were alive and well and living in a remote part of Africa, as I’d never seen them at the zoo. The...

Tigers have played a big part in literature, from the factual in Jim Corbett’s Man-eaters of Kumaon to the literary in The Life of Pi , And then there’s the children’s market – Tigger, in Winnie the Pooh and Hobbes in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes . Tigers seem to be able to represent just about anything, from the Nazis in The Tiger who Came to Tea , to the dishonourable side of man – Shere Khan in The Jungle Books . And in some way they all retain their basic nature; Tigger exhibits tigerishness, but it is muted to the less threatening play of a kitten: Tigger said: “Excuse me, but there’s something climbing up your table,” and with one loud Worraworraworraworraworra he jumped at the end of the tablecloth, pulled it to the ground, wrapped himself up in it three times, rolled to the other end of the room, and, after a terrible struggle, got his head into the daylight again, and said cheerfully: “Have I won?”          ...