Recently in Interview Category
Jack Gantos: Should I Stay or Should I Go
School Library Journal interview from last September with Jack Gantos - includes a link to an audio extract of the author reading from his Newbery winning novel, Dead End In Norvelt
Philip Kerr Interviiew - Telegraph
In 1993 Kerr was on Granta's list of Best Young British Novelists and has written a score of novels since (including a string of entertaining children's books under the name of PB Kerr) he is perhaps best known today for his series of Bernie Gunther novels...
Q&A feature with Shirley Hughes from yesterdays Guardian Weekend magazine.
Extract:
What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Buying things I don't need in junk and charity shops.
What do you owe your parents?
Unswerving support.
To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why?
Old friends, now dead, with whom I wish I'd spent more time.
Which living person do you most despise, and why?
Those who disparage the efforts of young people.
Short Q&A feature published in yesterday's Guardian.
When were you happiest? When I was a young father and teaching at a local primary school in Kent.What is your greatest fear?
Losing friends.What is your earliest memory?
Being walked to school through a pea-souper fog in London in 1947/48.
... Read the feature for more questions and responses
Wimpy Kid author, Jeff Kinney, interviewed in The Observer:
When Kinney first had the idea for the Wimpy Kid he thought it would be a one-off nostalgic book for adults. "I never thought I was writing for kids at all," he explains. "It really shocked and unsettled me to hear kids were buying the books. If I'd known I was writing for kids I might actually have spelt things out a bit more and that would probably have killed the appeal."He thinks the fact his characters have a slightly knowing, adult perspective is one of the qualities children find appealing. "Kids can sniff out when they are being preached to and they don't like it," he says. "So while my books aren't amoral they are not infused with morals or a message either and kids like that. They also like the fact that Greg is awkward and imperfect. He's not better than them at everything; he's struggling to manage life just as they are."
Book 6
Francesca Simon Talks About Latest Book
The author of Horrid Henry talks about how she created her latest book 'The Sleeping Army', one of The Daily Telegraph's Children's books of the year.
Alex Bell, author of the Lex Trent YA novels, interviewed on The Moore Show (she starts talking about the Trent books about 5 minutes in)
Neil Gaiman Talking To Shaun Tan
TAN: As an adolescent people would always say I was not expressive and they always made the mistake of thinking that I didn't feel anything, because I didn't react to things. My mind reacts but usually a long time after the fact - if something exciting happens I'll just sort of go "okaaaay, let me process that", and then three days later I'm excited about it, when everyone else has left the room... It's also an Australian thing and particularly characteristic of rural Australians. People have all these emotions - they're just not verbalising them.
Excellent Scotsman interview with the creator of Katie Morag:
"In Croatia, they grow sunflowers commercially in great fields," she says to me, much later. "If one sunflower grows taller than the rest, it's cut down because it will take the light away from its neighbours. That's how it is in small communities. You've got to keep the same height as the rest of the sunflowers. I try to keep a low profile on the island."
Kenneth Stewart is the last of the old Lairds of Coll, one of the loveliest of all the Hebridean islands. In this book Mairi Hedderwick, one of the island's best known inhabitants who has also known the laird since her first visit to the island more than fifty years ago, explores the laird's lifelong connection with Coll. The love of both for the island and its people shine through in these entrancing recollections. They reveal both the beauty of the island as well as the harshness of island life and the incredible story of how the laird inherited an estate burdened with debt, spending his life trying to rebuild a livelihood from it.
Maureice Sendak NYTimes Interview
...With books today, I'm not always sure if they're truthful or faithful to what's going on with children. If you look at the work of Tomi Ungerer, it's passionate, it's personal, it's marvelous and it's cuckoo, and it's that's kind of veracity that's always made for good children's literature.If there's anything missing that I've observed over the decades it's that that drive has declined. There's a certain passivity, a going back to childhood innocence that I never quite believed in. We remembered childhood as a very passionate, upsetting, silly, comic business.
I teach. I stress character, character, character. And for authors to go where you want; go where you will. Children will go everywhere.
Beverly Cleary Interviewed at 95
published a week ago in The Atlantic
