Deborah Ellis shares her experiences of researching her latest book, set in Afghanistan, My Name is Parvana. Late in the l990s, I spent time in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. Millions of Afghans fled there from the Soviet occupation, the civil war and then the atrocities of the Taliban. The stories I heard there […]
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We were talking about the old days, and I remembered the weirdest things. Like people calling them ‘friends’. And how they said they were good for your brain. Some families even laid a place for them at dinner. Debut novelist Nikki Sheehan shares her thoughts on the phenomenon of imaginary friends, based on her research […]
Read moreJohn Dougherty, author of the eye-poppingly funny new Stinkbomb and Ketchup-Face series (illustrated by David Tazzyman of Mr Gum fame), ruminates on imagination and surrealism in children’s books. You can’t imagine how thrilled I was to have my new book, Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face and the Badness of Badgers , chosen by The Times in early February as its Children’s Book of the Week. […]
Read moreStand-up comedian and author of the brand new The Private Blog of Joe Cowley, Ben Davis shares his top 3 favourite April Fool pranks… Hi everybody! My name is Ben Davis and I’m a writer. My debut novel is called The Private Blog of Joe Cowley . It’s about a fourteen-year-old boy who starts his own secret blog to document his […]
Read moreTo celebrate Mother’s Day, an ode to mums by Mina May, illustrator extraordinaire of the Wendy Quill series Wendy Quill is a Crocodile’s Bottom , Wendy Quill Tries to Grow a Pet and Wendy Quill is Full Up of Wrong (out July 2014), which she creates with her own mum, author Wendy Meddour. This is me when I was ten: the year I became an illustrator with Oxford University Press. I’ve wanted to be an […]
Read morePolly Shulman shares the challenges of writing her time-travel novel, The Wells Bequest , a story full of fantastic objects from popular science fiction stories and packed with fascinating time-travelling conundrums! I thought the hardest part of writing a time-travel novel would be getting the historical details right. I was wrong. The hardest part was dealing with the […]
Read moreTim Warnes on the joy of illustrating the Boris books and his inspiration behind some of the characters. I love working on the Boris books! They’re such great, warm-hearted stories, that working on Boris Gets Spots was like going back to an old pair of cosy slippers – comfy and relaxing! And I have to say I think […]
Read moreWriter and lexicographer John Ayto gives us a glimpse into The Oxford School Dictionary of Word Origins , a fascinating insight into words and where they came from… Have you got a tabby cat? Brown or grey with dark stripes? If you have, do you know why it’s called a tabby? If not, you could guess a thousand times and never […]
Read moreJulia Lee tells us about her love of atmospheric houses that feature in books she has enjoyed throughout her life, and which have helped inspire one of the key locations in her debut children’s novel, The Mysterious Misadventures of Clemency Wrigglesworth . It was one of the great disappointments of my childhood that I didn’t live in a house like Green […]
Read moreIt’s hard to believe that four and a half years have shot by since Frozen in Time was first published in January 2009. For its launch I dressed up in a 50s style frock and convinced my family to clothe themselves similarly (the menfolk objected but the frocks didn’t look bad), hired a Wurlitzer jukebox and got some […]
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