Authors Electric

Last week, in all the uproar surrounding the European elections and the government reeling from crisis to crisis, something happened that put other news in the shade: Judith Kerr died. One of the greatest and most loved children’s authors ever, she was responsible for The Tiger Who Came to Tea , Mog the Forgetful Cat and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit – classics which will never go out of print because, well, who can imagine a world without them? To be able to write and illustrate as brilliantly as Kerr did is a rare gift. I can think of only a handful of other authors who are in her league: Erics Carle and Hill with The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Where’s Spot respectively; John Burningham, Jill Murphy and Babette Cole with numerous books apiece; and of course, the master of animal delineation, characterisation and humour, Beatrix Potter. But for me Judith Kerr stands out because in The Tiger Who Came to Tea , she created the Picture Book of Picture Books. ...

I seem fated every year to be the bringer of sad news about a person who has been my friend, the friend of others on AE and a figure of respect and admiration  to many other readers and writers. Jim Riordan, Bob Leeson, Patricia Miles. And now comes, for me, the saddest of all. Pam Royds, Children's Book editor, first at Andre Deutsch and then at Scholastic, was 91. She was the editor who started the writing careers of both Jan and me. Our debt to her is immeasurable. Is it significant that my twenty-six years as a Deutsch and Scholastic author ended just before she finally retired?  As Jan will confirm, she was a noted fighter for her own writers. One of the last of the great  children's book editors. My first, initially bruising, meeting with Pam was in April 1973. Our first exchanges made me wonder why I'd even bothered to turn up. Yes, the lunch in Andre Deutsch's exclusive little dining room (those were the days!) was lovely and the whisky she insist...

Recently my elder son Oscar got stuck on a piece of homework. He moaned, ‘Our teacher wants us to write out a list of homophones and I can only think of one.’ His mum went over to help him and found that he’d written, at the top of his sheet of paper, ‘Nigel Farage’. She frowned a moment before exploding into giggles. ‘No, darling,’ she explained, ‘he’s a homo phobe .’ True. Oscar has from time to time struggled with the demands of English lessons. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised, when they often involve the taxonomy of words into nouns and verbs and adverbs and adjectives, which even my wife (who is far better read than I am) admits to muddling up. But what has puzzled me is that Oscar has to date shown little or no interest in reading. We’re told that we must read to our children, that we must fill our houses with books and let children discover this wonderful world… mate, you’d sprain an ankle on all the books in my house, I have to be bullied and kicked into rememberin...

I had an interesting virtual conversation with John Logan the other day, which I’d love to refer to but can’t find in my new technology nightmare. I’m running three computers at the moment – big desktop Mac (never liked Big Macs, fries or no fries), which is old and slow and infuriating, a laptop Mac, which is good but prone to sulking now and then, and losing things I haven’t yet saved, and a PC laptop the bloke over the road gave me. This one’s good, but VERY old, and throws enormous wobblies if the document I’m working on is more than twitter length. The doc I’m working on at the moment is about 300 pages. Serves me right. John and I were conversing about nasty reviews on Amazon and why they happen. I’d had a couple of humdingers, which appeared to have a slightly orchestrated tang to them, and I think he was impressed (can’t check, sadly – see above!). But his idea was to embrace them with love and affection, because if they went on it would make an interesting...