Authors Electric

This time last year I opened the Christmas month by waxing lyrical over one of my favourite books as a child: The Magic Pudding , the Australian children’s classic by Norman Lindsay. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster By Book, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/ w/index.php?curid=14265163 So this December I thought I’d follow that by enthusing about another great favourite: The Phantom Tollbooth by the American author, Norton Juster.  This glorious fantasy novel, bursting with puns and wordplay, leads Milo, a boy with nothing to do except drive his pedal car, into the Kingdom of Wisdom which has been rent asunder by disagreement between the two brothers ruling it. In Dictionopolis, King Azaz the Unabridged (a title I fell in love with on the spot) maintains that words are more important than numbers, while at the other end of the land, the Mathemagician insists, from his fortress of Digitopolis, that - yes, you’ve guessed it - the reverse is true. As a result the princesses, ...

It is March, and World Book Day approacheth… and I am delighted to find myself booked for the whole day. Christ Church Cathedral School, Oxford have asked for 3 workshops, one based on each of my books, to 3 different year groups, and I’m just hoping my voice doesn’t run out half way through the third one. I know this is nothing for many seasoned authors but I’ve never done quite so much in one day before and I’m wondering how to get into training. Talk more at home, perhaps, in the week up to Thursday, 7th March ? (What, more than you do already? exclaims my husband. Hmph. Thanks for that.) The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame One thing I do need to prepare, though: my costume. Dressing up as a favourite character in a children’s book is all part of the fun, apparently, but isn’t as easy as it sounds. Animals (Ratty in The Wind in the Willows , Reepicheep in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , Kanga in Winnie the Pooh ) are out, as far as I’m concerned, owing to complexity of cos...

First of all, thank you so much Griselda Hamway, for gifting me this date when I'd failed to blog on 20th. Our very much loved choir leader, Pauline, died recently. She’s had inoperable brain tumours. One afternoon soon after her diagnosis, I shared this poem with her.  CONSERVATION OF MATTER I am closer, now, to my after than I am to my before. This lively mass of atoms I now know as ‘me’, was here at the beginning; scattered after the Bang, then gathering, dispersing, re-grouping times out of mind, shapes out of imagining: Slime-mould, starlight, dormouse, willow tree, man, beast, parasite, building block, blade of grass, hover fly, china clay, drop in the ocean, grape-pip, earthworm, raincloud, prickle, soot – and when I break, dissolve, when I am no longer me – the atoms will re-form to be slime-mould, starlight, dormouse, willow tree? I wrote it to comfort myself and was so relieved and pleased that it comforted her too – and she asked me ...

Illustration from 'Alice and Sparkle' by... ??? Who   wrote that latest celebrity title piled high in every bookshop? And why does it matter? In his article 'Star Power' ( The Author,  spring 2023), Irish writer and illustrator Oisin McGann warns that celebrity books are in danger of taking over children's fiction. Experienced authors like him are often employed to ghostwrite such books, or at best collaborate with the celebrity, and yet their contribution is sometimes not even acknowledged; they simply get paid a fee for their work. You might think this is fine. Both authors - celebrity and ghostwriter - get paid. The celebrity gets their name featured prominently on the cover, the publisher gets a book they can sell easily, bookshops are delighted since they get commission on every sale, and the young reader gets a decent enough book for their money. Everyone is happy, everyone wins. But where is this heading? I'm old enough to remember when children's boo...

Recently, a headline in The Times caught my eye:  Make boys read books with girls in says Chocolat author Joanne Harris .  At the Hay Festival , Harris announced: ‘We’ve got to stop giving them the message that it’s wrong for a boy to read books about girls, because even schools are giving them this message.’ The Tragickall History of Henry Fowst by Griselda Heppel Ante's Inferno by Griselda Heppel As a children’s author, this is an attitude I wrestle with. I don’t consciously create characters to suit a supposed readership; they spring to life according to the needs of the story.  My first book, Ante’s Inferno , had a 12 year-old heroine, Ante, while in The Tragickall History of Henry Fowst , the main character is a boy. The Fall of a Sparrow by Griselda Heppel With The Fall of a Sparrow , I was back to a female protagonist, Eleanor, and arguably taking an even greater risk of limiting my readership by setting the story in a girls’ boarding school, as this meant the ...