Authors Electric

Happy panellists: (l to r) Mary Hoffman, Anne Rooney (chair), me, Sue Limb Last Saturday I was invited back to my university college to take part in a fascinating Literary Archive Day discussing children's literature, inspired by the Rogers Collection, a wonderful treasure trove of children's books donated to Newnham College in the late nineteenth century. No other college library in Cambridge – or Oxford, I believe, though someone will probably put me right – has anything to match this. What better reason to gather together a bunch of Newnhamite children's authors? The Rogers Collection Christina Hardyment and Caroline Lawrence gave superb talks on Arthur Ransome and Mythic Tropes in Children’s Fiction respectively, while I made up a panel with Mary Hoffman and Sue Limb to discuss how children's writing has changed over the last few decades. An excellent opening speech from Dr Gill Sutherland ('A child who does not feel wonder is merely an inle...

Recent events have got me thinking about self censorship. I am hardly alone in that, nor are my thoughts particularly insightful, but bear with me if I share them anyway. As the product of my largely liberal education, I am in favour of free speech. There are inevitably a few politicians I would love to gag, a couple of radio pundits, and pretty much everyone on day time television who would greatly improve the quality of my life by never speaking in public again. ( This goes for a few people, I actually know too.)   I hate everything that suggests that a woman should only be concerned about her hairy underarms, wrinkles, cellulite, and ‘greys’, that suggests that without shiny straight hair and perfect toned physiques we are somehow failures, that we are less competent, more emotional, manipulative and hard to understand than the other half of the human race. If I were a person of colour, disabled, gay or transgender I would no doubt be as sensitive to any speech which denigr...

Last month, Julia Jones posted a lovely piece about writing for and working with children. I’ve written stories for the same age group but it reminded me most of a day I spent at a primary school which held a ‘literacy day’. The classes went from wee 3 year olds to 10 year olds and I had about 35 minutes with each. It was a day of enthusiasm, engagement and (for me) high entertainment. With all but two of the classes (oldest and youngest) I read them one of my own stories about Stanley, a miserabilist, misanthropic fairy who lives under a dripping tap in our bedroom, but the bulk of the time was given over to them creating stories of their own. My first question to the first class was ‘What do we need to start a story?’ The hands shot up, I chose one, a girl, who said ‘Once upon a time’. Incontestable. I then got suggestions about characters and locations and by simply asking them questions, which were my only input, got them to produce one or several stories. Here are just so...