Authors Electric

As a writer of books for children, you might expect me also to be a regular reader of them. But how many other adults are? And what types of children’s books do adults tend to read? I remember a beta reader of my first completed (as yet unpublished) novel ‘Time out of Time’ saying she thought lots of adults might enjoy it as a ‘cross-over’ book, owing to the copious references to my 1970s’ childhood. It was the first time I’d really thought about whether my books could be classed as ‘cross-over’. A quick Google search suggests the term might more readily be applied to books enjoyed by both adults and teenagers, rather than children (e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/sep/19/thegrandtraditionofcrossov ), drawing on ‘coming-of-age’ themes instead of aiming squarely at pre-teens as my books do. But ultimately, after publishing my first two books, The Order of the White Boar and The King’s Man , conversations with buyers and readers (both face to face and ...

I showed this photo to a group of ten year olds at a primary school in Clacton-on-Sea without telling them what it was. I asked them to imagine they were on their own, aged about twelve, and looking up at it. They had thirty seconds to look and thirty seconds to jot down words. Then they were allowed to call them out: “Dragon – sea lion – exciting – ugly – fierce – hairy – epic – weird – Elvis Presley hair – alien – zombie dragon – halloween decoration – statue – fat – dirty – slimy – red – Chinese dragon” In fact it's a figurehead from a Dutch warship, the Stavoren , built in Edam in 1653. She was built for the Amsterdam Admiralty (each section of the United Provinces supplied and managed their own fleets) and was probably sponsored by the town whose name she bore. Pencil sketches made in 1658 show, indistinctly, that she had a large painting of a town emblazoned across her stern. The Stavoren was a 48-gun ship with a crew of 180 men and the exciting, ugly, fierce...