Authors Electric

Years ago, when I was a teenager, I happened to see a short snippet in a newspaper from someone in Japan who was looking for a British pen-pal. I was a very prolific letter-writer in these teenage, pre-email days. Hard to remember the time when people could even communicate without having social media at their fingertips. Though it was much more exciting to get an actual letter from somewhere overseas, with different stamps on it – my brother collected stamps – and a different style of handwriting, than it is to receive an email. I suppose for a while I collected pen-pals the way my brother collected stamps. I had several pen-pals from inside the UK, and during my teens I also acquired pen-pals in the USA, Russia, Pakistan and Germany as well as in Japan. I have to say the Americans were the most fun to write to – although we may be divided by a common language, it was easier to write in the knowledge that they would probably understand most of what you wrote and vice versa, and yet th...

This is the cover image of the last of my Early Reader books - I did four this year, with Franklin Watts, my publisher at Hachette, as part of their "Reading Champion" series. I love the colours - that wonderful 'sailing into the sunset' atmosphere, with the ogres' castle in the distance - but found the two animals rather strange, although Andy did his research and told me that there's a kind of Japanese dog that does look like that, so I have to believe him. And of course, this is a version of a well-known Japanese story - the story of Momotaro, the Peach Boy Writing-wise, I have mixed feelings about these books, as the 'educational' requirement always mean that the text is fiddled with to fit the rules. In the past, I've always enjoyed working with editors - I worked with some brilliant ones, like Anne Carter, and the very eminent, but sadly deceased Wendy Boase, she of the Branford-Boase Prize. This, however, isn't creative editing - i...

I don't often use this post for blatant marketing. My hope is to entertain, or make you think - if only for a moment. If anyone is inspired to follow the links and buy a book, well that's a bonus. So please bear with me, just this once. You'll see why. You can't have missed the news about recent earthquakes. This time last year is was Nepal. Recently there have been two huge quakes in Japan, followed by a third in Ecuador. Each time there are pictures of collapsed buildings, exhausted men and women digging in the rubble in the hope of pulling one person out alive. Anyone who survives under the stones and the dust for longer than a day or so is celebrated. Do we, from the comfort of our sofas, grow immune to such disasters? Do we see so many that we forget that these are people just like us, with children and dreams. People who work and play and squabble over what to watch on the telly. People who want nothing more than family around them, food to eat - and a r...

This week, I had a second picture book app - MORE - published by utales. It's a re-telling of the traditional story about a magic bowl which must be properly used, and the misfortunes of the greedy person who steals it. I've set my story in India, with a hungry small boy, a beggar woman who turns into a goddess, and a fat and greedy maharajah (it occurs to me that one could do a similar re-telling using a contemporary setting and a greedy banker). Setting it in India is the excuse for using all those wonderful Indian colours and patterns, and my illustrator, Claudia Fehr-Levin, has really gone to town on these. If you'd like to take a look at a sample, you can find it here.  Speaking of colour and all its delights, we went to the David Hockney exhibition yesterday, and I was gobsmacked - no, eye -smacked. The opening paintings didn't impress me so much (I've always preferred his drawings) but when we went further into the show and found ourselves drowning in...