Calling all librarians, teachers and parents – is there a child in Britain not doing Jubilee/Olympics as their ‘topic’ in school this term? Both mine certainly are. There are some great non-fiction titles related to both these topics, but what…
Check out the amazing new cover art for my next novel ‘Pop!’ which comes out in June 2012. It’s on the Books page if you want to take a look and let me know what you think! I can’t quite…
Very touched and excited to hear the Heroes has been longlisted for The Brandford Boase AND the Southern Schools Book Award! Loving the BBA because it’s an award for editors too and my editor, the amazing Ali Dougal at Egmont,…
Today I’m all of a flutter, more than a little bit giddy and floating round in state of shock. Why? Because The 2012 Carnegie Nominations were announced today and there I was, up there with my literary heroes: John Boyne,…
Flipping Nora! This month just gets better and better! First it was The Carnegie Medal nomination, now I’ve just found out that We Can be Heroes has also been long-listed for The Redbridge Children’s Book Award AND short-listed for The…
As part of this year’s Bath Festival of Children’s Literature, twenty children’s authors are taking part in an ongoing story project which has been moving from blog to blog for the last week or two, with each author continuing the…
This is a piece I wrote for Armadillo Magazine. You can check out the rest of the great magazine at: tinyurl.com/6kplw4v Writing for Children in a Post 9/11 World ‘For a story to truly hold the child’s attention, it must…
Discussion points for book groups This post is written in honour of my own lovely book-group who told me I had to have a section on my website with discussion points for book groups. And since I wrote We Can…
When people ask me about writing We Can be Heroes the first question they usually ask is, ‘Why did you chose to write about 9/11?’. I could start by saying that We Can be Heroes is not really about 9/11,…
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at a conference about 9/11 which was run by Amnesty International and The Three Faiths Forum. At the start they showed a brilliant film of kids being asked what they knew about 9/11…