Authors Electric

  Enid Richemont For many years the 28th of each month has been the day when Enid Richemont blogged for Authors Electric -- usually in the form of a diary entry, with news of her books -- which covered a wide field -- or proudly writing of her daughter's theatre career. Sadly, there will be no more diary entries from Enid. In the late months of 2020 Authors Electric learned, first, that Enid had been diagnosed with cancer -- and then, all too quickly, that she was very ill and had died. We feel her loss. Enid was born and grew up in South Wales but spent most of her life in north London. Her marriage to David Richemont was a long and happy one and they raised two children.   Enid and David   Enid won a scholarship to Dublin's College of Art, where she studied painting and design; and she taught in a Rudolf Steiner school. Together with her family, she lived for two years in Paris. She wrote for both adults and children and her work has been translated into Danish, German,...

  Most of us, when we were kids, have played some form of the gruesome verbal game of "Would you rather...?" Would you rather be eaten by a crocodile or swallowed by a whale? Would you rather be drowned in the sea or frozen in a deep freeze? Would you rather be locked up forever inside a chest, like the lost girl in the story, or would you prefer to be thrown from the top of the Empire State Building? For lucky children with kind and loving families, it feels like fun to flirt with terrible things, daring them to come on while knowing they are fantasies, and so we can push the improbable scenarios to impossible extremes. Nobody really believes in their own death, in spite of wills being drawn up (my daughter wrote an elaborate one when she was about nine) and funerals planned, often in great detail. These things feel like theatre, and the fact that we won't be there to watch a bit irrelevant, unless we believe in ghosts. I have, very recently, had a reality check in the...

I had the pleasure of visiting my young granddaughter Daisy last weekend – and of seeing how much she has developed and changed since starting school in September. She can now write most of her letters, forming them with great care and precision, while reciting little verses to guide her. She can also put letters together to make simple words, and can spell out some unfamiliar words letter by letter and then read the whole word ‘F – O – G… fog!’ But what struck me most was the sheer joy of accomplishment on her face when she correctly read or spelled a word. And the way that she has started seeing words everywhere she goes – in shops, on signs – and her delight in recognising them and saying them out loud. Suddenly her familiar and well-thumbed books have become treasure troves, not just of pictures but of these wonderful new things called words – and wow, is she excited? Daisy is lucky – she is part of a family where books are loved and the house is full of them. She’s ...

My latest children's book with Franklin Watts is called "MORE" , and it's a re-telling of the classic folk tale of the magic bowl which fills itself with whatever food you might wish for, as long as you follow the rules which aren't really that difficult. However, there wouldn't be a story unless something goes disastrously wrong. There's a Grimms version of it, involving a poor soldier returning from war, whose bowl is stolen at an inn and then misused, but there are many others.  In my version, it's a greedy maharajah with a serious eating disorder who covets the bowl. and here he is in all his overblown glory, as portrayed by my brilliant illustrator Shahab Shamshirsuz. The maharajah will demand the bowl owned by the young son of a poor family (which of course he gets because they have no choice) and takes it back to his palace in order to stuff himself whenever he feels like it, but oh dear! There is a quite serious problem which only one person...