Authors Electric

What’s the earliest birthday of your own that you can remember? For me, along with quite a few other people, I believe, it’s my fourth. 1959, that would have been (no, please don’t bother to work out how old I am). May 1959 in St Eval, an RAF base near Newquay in Cornwall. I have a number of ‘memory glimpses’ that are clearly linked to this day, though nothing of much consequence happened, looking back. My grandmother – ‘Nana’ – came to stay, catching the train from Pontefract in Yorkshire and changing at Bristol… a long day’s journey which I remember making myself a number of times. It was always fun to have Nana to stay – she was different and exciting. And on this birthday she bought me a doll’s pram, a big one, nearly as big as a real baby’s pram, in my memory at least. It was second-hand – I’m not sure why, as we weren’t well-off but neither were we very poor. Not that its second-handedness bothered me – it made it more fun because it was navy blue and a bit shabby, and N...

The Finnish edition of my book - "THE NIGHT OF THE WERE BOY" came out earlier this year, but I've only just received the physical copy. It's a very funny story, based on a cat who's affected by the full moon to change into something else - in this case, a boy, than which nothing, in the moggie's interpretation, coud be lower. I mean, no TAIL? No WHISKERS? No FUR? Also a creature which pees INDOORS (disgusting!) and which has to put on scratchy and uncomfortable CLOTHES before it can present itself to the world. I mean, UGH!   I knew that my publisher had sold the Finnish rights to the book much earlier this year, but I didn't receive a copy, so I agitated, because Finnish is such an extraordinary language. I finally discovered this edition via Goodreads, where it showed up, unexpectedly as "KISSAPOJAN YO" which I initially thought might be pornographic (these things can, and do, happen) but no, it was, indeed my book. I'm still struggling ...