BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts | Quentin Blake: A life in pictures
Renowned illustrator Quentin Blake has been made a CBE in the New Year Honours list.
ACHUKA: December 2004 Archives
Potter's Peter Told In Ancient Egyptian
BEATRIX POTTER?S The Tale of Peter Rabbit has been translated into ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs by a curator from the British Museum and a retired medical expert.
Gretchen Breary and Me (about Nancy Breary)
In a passage from Fathers and Sons by Alexander Waugh (p.290), with regard to Evelyn Waugh's relationships with his children, particularly Teresa and Auberon:
When Vera [the children's nanny] gave Teresa [his daughter] a children's novel by Nancy Breary for Christmas he confiscated it. Vera was terrified, but the next day Evelyn came into the nursery with the novel in his hand, 'Vera is a genius! This book is awfully well written," he proclaimed and returned it to Teresa.
You will look in vain for entries about Nancy Breary in general reference titles such as The Cambridge Guide to Children's Books or The Oxford Companion, so the above link is of special interest.
There are currently two of Breary's books available on eBay - not via ACHUKA Auctions, but we are happy to advertise them nevertheless:
Philadelphia Inquirer | 12/27/2004 | His life is pegged to old techniques
Lofting, 59, said he learned timber framing from craftsmen in New England in the early 1970s. When he started his business in 1974, he said, there were only a few timber framers in Pennsylvania. But now, he said, there are about two dozen working in the area. He said he has trained a third of them...If Lofting's name has a familiar ring, it is because his grandfather is author Hugh Lofting, creator of the Doctor Dolittle series of children's books.
His seven-member firm, with annual gross receipts of $800,000, includes his daughter, Elliott (an old family name), and his son, Hugh II.
Could children's author & illustrator, Shoo Rayner be the 'weakest link'. Shoo is rumoured to feature in the Bank Holiday show to be broadcast Monday 27th December at 5.15pm on BBC2.
Hot announcement from Bloomsbury!!!
J.K. ROWLING?S HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE
TO BE PUBLISHED ON 16th JULY, 2005 IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND AND SOUTH AFRICA
Read full Press Release...
Continue reading Half-Blood Prince Publication Date.
Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Profile: Raymond Briggs
Long, excellent profile (by Nicholas Wroe) of Raymond Briggs...
In a recent appearance on the children's TV programme Blue Peter, answering questions from a group of children, Briggs referred to himself as a "miserable git", corrected one child for an error in a question, explained that endings are inherently sad because death is the real ending and praised a 12-year-old's self-portrait by saying it made the child "look about 40".
Not to be missed...
OBSERVERS BELIEVE SCHOLASTIC Publisher Richard Scrivener, who left the company last week, will find another position relatively quickly, given the expansion in children?s publishing in recent years.
A report in Publishing News expresses no surprise at Richard Scrivener's departure from Scholastic, and a good deal of confidence that he will find a new role in children's publishing fairly swiftly.
This is Rowan Stanfield's last day in the Orion office. ACHUKA understands that her role will be temporarily covered in the New Year by Jo Williams, previously at HarperCollins.
Into The Mystic: The Mary Poppins Enigma
Fascinating feature from Monday's Times by author of Out Of The Sky She Came: The Life Of P. L. Travers (Hodder Headline Australia).
A South Bank Show special, about the biographer's search of her subject, will be shown on the South Bank Show, ITV, on Boxing Day. Mary Poppins, the stage show, opened at the Prince Edward Theatre yesterday.
Newsday.com - Movies and Showtimes
Recommended Newsday article about'darkness' in children's books...
"You can trace unhappy endings to the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen. Early fairy tales were gruesome," says Susan Rich, who edits the Snicket books, written by 34-year-old Daniel Handler. Handler's books "are a natural outgrowth of Victorian stories, where bad things are always happening to orphans." Dicken's Oliver Twist comes to mind, but Rich thinks the Snicket stories also follow in the tradition of Dahl, who "portrayed fairly tragic, alarming scenarios for his young protagonists."
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | A book for Christmas
Dina Rabinovitch selected her 10 favourite children's books of the year in yesterday's Guardian...
BBC NEWS | UK | Instilling a joy of reading
Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo says instilling a "joy of reading" in young children would help address a widening gap in primary school reading standards... ...
CNN.com - Tom Wolfe wins bad sex award - Dec 13, 2004
American author and journalist Tom Wolfe won one of the world's most dreaded literary accolades on Monday -- the British prize for bad sex in fiction...
Tom Conti presented the award to an absent Tom Wolfe. In his witty introduction, Alexander Waugh - son of Auberon, founder of the award - had teased the audience into thinking that Wolfe had been present, chatting to guests at the start of the evening, but had fled prior to the presentation.
It was my first time at the Award party - (I had been on the brink of attending last year, when it seemd likely that Melvin Burgess would be shortlisted for passages in Doing It) - and it was refreshing to be at an event where I did not have to have the ACHUKA camera in hand, finger ever-ready on the button.
It was also novel not to see the usual posse of familiar faces amongst the guests. There were plenty of readily recognizable media people there, but hardly anyone I had met previously.
An exception was Richard Beswick, editor of my biography of Tennyson. It was good to have a quick chat with him, and to hear him sharing thoughts with Alexander Waugh on the current low esteem of literary biography. Waugh's own book - Fathers And Sons, The Autobiography Of A Family - has been getting rave reviews here, but is apparently hampered in the US by its 'arts & letters' ambience.
My latest children's books page is in Literary Review's excellent current issue.
Another profile of Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, from yesterday's Herald...
Recommended
A colour magazine feature in yesterday's Times Magazine (p36), with double-page-spread group photo of Joyce Dunbar, Jane Ray, Jeanette Winterson, Polly Dunbar, Jan Ormerod, Lindsey Gardiner, Michael Rosen, Neal Layton, Allan Ahlberg, Raymond Briggs, Axel Scheffler and Julia Donaldson - all of whom are interviewed in author-illustrator pairs.
Well worth tracking down. Raymond Briggs on great form. Saying, of Allan Ahlberg's request for him to be the illustrator of the first Bert book: "He just thought I'd be cheap! I'd never heard of him. I thought with his funny foreign name he was an asylum seeker and his career might need a leg-up." And returning to a theme he developed a year or two ago in our ACHUKA interview, namely his belief that the Bert books should have been published in small format: "Publishers are so stupid. I imagined about four Bert books, a Bert's Box, even, but they said small books don't sell. What about Beatrix Potter and Mr Men, for God's sake?"
From yesterday's Times, David Almond talks about his first efforts at fiction writing, in a feature that included Margaret Atwood, Ali Smith and Ian Rankin. [Scroll down the webpage to locate Almond's section.]
When this book, Skellig, was published by Hodder, I was called a new writer. It was assumed that it must be my first book. No one had heard of the little Iron Press or the little Sleepless Nights. But both books shared a starting point, in a room in an ancient Suffolk farm, and both were similarly important to me, in building that unpredictable pursuit called a literary career.
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Frog and friends
A profile of Max Velthuijs, by Joanna Carey...
Not to be missed
Competition Update & Latest Clues
Competition Closed
The winner will be announced tomorrow.
Continue reading Top Ten Competition Entries + Clues.
Many of you adore our ACHUKACHICK Logo - so I've decided to make ACHUKACHICK available on various Cafepress items in time for Christmas!
Penny Webber (seen below right with Venetia Gosling and Patrick Cave), currently Children's Marketing Director at Simon & Schuster, and previously at Macmillan, is leaving at the end of the month to go freelance - and relocating (like BBC Children's TV) to Manchester.
Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Child's eye view
An interview with Lauren Child, about her new book Hubert Horatio Bobdon-Trent...
it is the first of Child's books to be produced entirely on computer rather than using a mixture of media; it was all drawn and coloured on screen then printed off, cut out, put together again as a collage with scissors and glue then scanned back in.
Highly recommended
The Observer | Review | Gore blimey
Kate Kellaway writes a long piece about Darren Shan and the attraction of horror to children aged 8 and up.
Highly recommended
Daily News Transcript - Arts & Culture News
A profile of David Macaulay:
Macaulay, a trim and youthful 57, is probably best known for the weighty 1988 opus, The Way Things Work (Houghton Mifflin, 384 pages, $30), and its sequel, published 10 years later. It's a colorful and cartoonish exploration, demystifying complexities ranging from salad spinners, squirt guns and vacuum cleaners to the less homey technology of nuclear power... ...
Recommended
Young Adult Fiction Authors: Where Are They Now? - Student Life - Cadenza
Recommended feature...
The latest issue of Shanville Monthly...
In the delegates'
pack, David Belbin, the conference's organiser, wrote: |
