I think we set ourselves a mighty challenge with creating ‘Wild Summer: Life in the Heat’. How to make a book that spotlights a daunting and somewhat apocalyptic topic – climate change – and examples of what a warming planet is doing to wildlife, into a friendly and appealing book for young readers?! […]
Mention the word poetry to many adults and the response may well be indifference, but for children it can have a universal appeal, which is fortunate because rhymed poetry and verse are important for their language development. We are born into a world of rhythm, from the heartbeat of the womb to the pulses of […]
All children should have access to a good libraries and green spaces. They’re both essential for feeding the imagination. Have you ever walked down a path and wondered what you’ll find at the end? Followed a stream to see where it begins? Or perhaps squeezed through an overgrown passageway between houses to peek into a […]
Nicola, we have always been a fan of your one-word titles! Always eye-catching and intriguing, was this always part of your writing plan? What impact did you want this to have on readers? Thank you! It was never, originally, part of the plan – the title for Bloom came about by accident via a series […]
Rex: Dinosaur in Disguise is about standing out, fitting in, finding your place in the world and of course a band of supposedly extinct animals! What inspired this story and how do you hope it will inspire the children who read it? When I began writing Rex I didn’t really set out to say anything […]
There must be a moment in our childhoods when we became interested in books. A moment when we thought… this is for me. This is a doorway into something more and I want to step through it. We moved from the task of learning to read, through to a self-motivated desire to read for ourselves, […]
About ten years ago I was spending an awful lot of time in the Oxford Museum of Natural History with my then 5 year old son Herbie. It was our favourite place to hang out. The Oxford Museum was built before that other famous one in London – in fact, it inspired the London one. […]
The protagonist of Finding Jupiter writes found poetry. How did you first discover found poetry and what impact has it had in your own life? Why was it important for you to weave found poetry into Finding Jupiter? Before I knew what my young adult novel would be about, I knew that I wanted it to […]
Ready or Not is a thriller about the disappearance of a teenage girl called Kat who goes missing during a game of hide-and-seek on holiday in Cornwall. The same group of three families have gone away together for years so the kids have grown up together, but cracks are appearing in their friendships. One year […]
When I first met my protagonist, Isabel Ryans, she was living in the wrong book. As the secretary to the main character of a crime novel I would never finish, she was bursting with backstory. She’d worked as an assassin since her teens. She was connected to a shadowy organisation called Comma. Her first language […]
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