Authors Electric

Doors closed on originality? Photo by burcubyzt_85: https://www.pexels.com/ photo/vintage-wooden-door-with-distinctive- handles-36306962/ I learnt something new on X the other day. (And no, it wasn’t the latest cancellations, though there’s plenty of that going on).  I can’t remember how it came up, but both Lissa Evans (a writer I greatly admire) and I were intrigued to discover the origin of the term cliché. I am rather ashamed that I never bothered to look it up before. I’d always assumed it had something to do with the French for a door closing: a boring, hackneyed phrase shutting off originality. Goodness knows where I got that notion from because it’s definitely barking up the wrong tree (an idiom, by the way, not a cliché; a nice distinction I found going down rabbit holes online… oops, there goes another).  How to describe a beautiful sunset and bring it freshly to life. Instead, the verb clicher means ‘to click’. Its use as a noun goes back as far as 1825 and originat...

I have just read a statistic that brought me up short. It came towards the end of ‘Why Children’s Books?’, an excellent article in the London Review of Books , Vol 47, No 2 (oh all right, 6 February 2025… yes I know, I’ve been catching up) by Katherine Rundell.   Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell The multi-prizewinning author of Rooftoppers , The Wolf Wilder , Impossible Creatures and other enchanting children’s books wrote a passionate defence of childhood reading, how it builds and stretches the imagination, preparing the mind and spirit for experiences that will come with adulthood, while at the same time fostering joy, delight, excitement and escapism. ‘A children’s book,’ she writes, ‘is not a luxury good. It is fundamental to our culture, to the grown-ups we become, to the society we build.’ Which is why, she warns, the decline of reading for pleasure in 8 – 18 year-olds is so serious. According to the National Literacy Trust’s Annual Li...