It’s a necessary quality in any writer that they be curious. It’s a circular thing really; you’re curious about life, so you write about it to help you sort it out in your own head and communicate those thought processes to others. And once you’re in the habit of writing, you look for more things to write about. But…
Last week, I joined a bunch of writers and illustrators to have a lunch with Children’s Laureate, Siobhan Parkinson. The location was Airfield in Dundrum, which has nothing to do with airplanes, but is in fact a farm in the suburbs of Dublin which has a small cafe/restaurant, a farm shop and a vintage car collection, among other things….
Well . . . no, not quite. But I was recently interviewed by Olive O’Brien for her new children’s book blog, Lilliput Library, on the Hello Magazine’s website. One question that came up during the interview with Jackie Hayden in the Riverbank Arts Centre on Saturday was how one goes about getting interviews in the media. There is no…
Every author dreams of producing the kind of book that can maintain its freshness, its sheer entertainment value for fifty years. One such book is ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, by Harper Lee. Irish Publishing News featured an article from The Guardian last week, discussing the book’s enduring popularity (that’s another phrase authors dream of: enduring popularity). It is the…
The Wildenstern Saga is being published in France by Mango Jeunesse, translated by Patrick Imbert. They’ve just sent me the cover for ‘Ancient Appetites’, or ‘Voraces’, and I have to say, it’s pretty cool. I saw an earlier version last week and asked for a minor change to the back cover and they actually took that on board, which…
It’s a constant refrain of mine that there’s a problem with the way boys read. Girls have their own problems too (and delight in discussing those and many other problems at length). But when it comes to reading across the full range of fiction, lads are bit, well . . . squeamish. This is a particular problem as boys…
Much more of this and I’m going to start sounding like a conspiracy nut. All right, most people would have to admit that the school library fingerprinting kids was a bit creepy. And my piece on Google a while back was not wholly paranoid, given that they have flaunted copyright laws and it has taken numerous countries and one…
This letter has been sent to my local representatives, to the Minister for Education and Skills, to the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs. I am writing to you to protest at the potential loss of an absolutely vital programme for young people, not through cuts but through simple inaction. The Junior Cert Support…
My Weird-Wide News posts are normally aimed at my younger readers. So I’m going to try and keep this simple, even though it is one of the weirdest posts I’ve done. But it is real. And yet it’s hardly made the normal news at all. I got it from the UK newspaper, ‘The Telegraph’. Britain has a much better…
I picked this one off David Maybury’s blog the other day. Research done by the National Literacy Trust in the UK has discovered that more kids over there own a mobile phone (86%) than own a book (73%). All the more reason to produce books that can be read on phones, don’t you think? I can’t say I was…