Tell me what inspired you to write for children? As a teacher and parent of two young boys, I’m around children all the time. I love sharing stories with kids so I suppose at some point I must have thought I’d give it a go myself. I can’t really pin-point the exact moment that I first sat down to write. How hard was it to get your first book published? […]
Tell me what inspired you to write for children? As a child, I loved books. The wonderment, the characters I met, the places I travelled to. I have beautiful, fond memories of books and the magic of stories from my childhood. As I writer, I’ve always wanted to create books that provide that same wonderment for children. How hard was it to get your first book published? Getting anything published […]
What inspired you to write crime set in Turkey? I’ve always been a crime fiction fan. But when I wanted to read something set in a country I’d been going to all my life, I couldn’t find anything at the time (1990s) except the 1950s espionage novels of Eric Ambler. And so, first of all as a way of relaxing after my stressful job in a psychiatric hospital, I decided […]
Tell me what inspired you to write The Mystery of The Colour Thief? I was volunteering as a school governor at an inner city primary school, where the headteacher had recently introduced an in-school counselling service. She was telling us about its positive effects, and mentioned a pupil who had come to her office saying the sessions had made ‘the colours return’ in her life. Her words stayed with me […]
Tell me what inspired you to write for children? Two things really. First, I have two young children myself, 8 and 11 now, and over the past few years I have really enjoyed getting back into children’s literature and reading them stories at bedtime. There’s so much excellent new stuff nowadays! (although I also read them the books that I enjoyed as a child). I got excited about children’s books […]
Tell me what inspired you to write Brightstorm? I’ve always loved real-life stories of exploration like Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition to Antarctica. My initial idea for Brightstorm came from Shackleton’s advert to find his crew. I also love Amelia Earhart for how she influenced so many females to pursue their dreams – she inspired the captain of the main sky-ship in Brightstorm, Harriet Culpepper. How hard was it to get […]
Tell me what inspired you to write crime books? When I was a kid I lived in Africa. My parents used to go to sleep for an hour or two every afternoon because it was so hot. I never could, so I worked my way through their green-backed Penguins. I think boredom is a great motivator! What can you tell us about your books currently published? In paperback I have […]
Tell me what inspired you to write the Boy at the Back of the Class? I’ve been so fortunate as to be travelling out in my spare time to the refugee camps of Calais and Dunkirk in France since 2015, to aid the phenomenal long-term volunteers working to help refugees stuck there. But there was no plan to write a book about anything to do with that arm of my […]