ACHUKA Children's Books UK

children's & YA recommendations on the go

  • News
    • Reviews
  • Illustrated
    • Meet An Illustrator
  • Fiction
    • Humour
    • Classics/Reissues
    • YA
  • Non-Fiction
  • Poetry & Tales
  • Gift
  • Links
  • About
    • ACHUKAstudio
    • Contact me
You are here: Home / Archives for feature

Times Feature On The ‘King And Queen Of Picture Books’

February 11, 2018 By achuka Leave a Comment

Alex O’Connel visits John Burningham and Helen Oxenbury..

Burningham explains that they are their own best critics. “We depress each other more than we uplift. You work all week on something and it’s, ‘Oh my God, that foot is all wrong, it lacks colour!’ ” says Burningham. “I only bring work back [here] if there is a problem,” says Oxenbury. “I ask him, ‘What do you think is wrong?’ ”There is a pause. “You have a terrible problem with pretty ladies, don’t you?” says Oxenbury to her husband, a twinkle in her eye.“Do I?” says Burningham, archly.“They are dreadful. If he has a fairy to draw . . . they’re awful!”It’s hard to draw the beautiful, I offer, like a human Switzerland.

via ‘If you limit children then they don’t learn’ | Saturday Review | The Times.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: feature, interview

Chris Haughton Feature In Irish News

December 5, 2017 By achuka Leave a Comment

Jenny Lee chats to award-winning Dublin-born children’s picture book author Chris Haughton about his eclectic career, the secret of writing for young readers and seeing his work transformed into a stage production…

“In all my books, I use colour to tell the story, highlight the most important aspect and heighten the drama,” he explains.

His readers may be under five, but Haughton believes the secret of his success is that he makes them page turners.

“When planning my books, what I love thinking about is the before and after page turn. There has to be that anticipation and drama as you turn the page. With Shh! We Have a Plan, they are lining up to catch the bird and are poised with the net and looks like they are going to catch him this time, and you turn the page and you see the bird is flying off as they miss again,” he laughs.

An entertaining tale of three hapless hunters being bamboozled by birds, this funny, engaging and poignant tale won the Assocation of Illustrators award for best Children’s Book in 2014 and has been translated to the stage by Northern Ireland children’s theatre company Cahoots NI.


Waterstones

full feature >>> https://www.waterstones.com/book/shh-we-have-a-plan/chris-haughton/chris-haughton/9781406360035

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: feature, illustrator, interview, Irish

Cressida Cowell Feature In County Press

December 1, 2017 By achuka Leave a Comment

I don’t post all links I find in local and county presses because they are often insubstantial. But this ‘Big Interview’ with Cressida Cowell is certainly worthy of attention and contains a good helping of photographs too…

“As a parent you should read to children as long as you can and well beyond a period when your child can read for themselves.

“Reading to children is part of what I grew up with and the stories my parents read to me when I was a child are the stories I remember the most.

“In my books I like them to read about a dad who cries or a mum who laughs. It is a way for children and parents enjoying books together.

“It was while reading aloud I first realised I wanted to write books as the effect they can have on you is special.”

Full piece >>> http://www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk/news/15682572.THE_BIG_INTERVIEW__Cressida_Cowell_speaks_to_the_County_Gazette_about_dragons__wizards_and_magic/

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: feature, interview

A. A. Milne & Winnie The Pooh – FT Feature

December 1, 2017 By achuka Leave a Comment

As an exhibition is about to open at the V&A, Lorien Kite (books editor at the Financial Times) explores the significance of AA Milne’s most famous creation.

It’s a good piece. Following the link recommended…

‘Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic’ runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from December 9 to April 8 2018

Milne was 41 when he began work on When We Were Very Young; a successful playwright and a humorist who had made his name with the magazine Punch. As a model for the idealised childhood, his own was hard to better. Growing up above the north London school run by his father, a headmaster with progressive views on education, he and his two brothers had been encouraged to roam as they pleased from an early age and follow their intellectual passions where they led. This propelled Alan, the youngest and most precocious, first to Westminster School on a scholarship and then to Cambridge, where his editorship of the university journal Granta gave him a platform to pursue a career in journalism. Milne’s contradictions were becoming apparent in this period. Specialising as a satirist in vignettes of middle-class life, he moved freely in clubland and made a fashionable marriage in 1913 to Daphne de Sélincourt, goddaughter of the then Punch editor Owen Seaman. In his will he split the rights to Pooh between his family, the Royal Literary Fund, Westminster and the Garrick Club.

full piece >>> https://www.ft.com/content/c237835e-d49d-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d5c9

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: feature

Biographical Feature About Alison Uttley

November 27, 2017 By achuka Leave a Comment

Alice Jane Taylor, as she was born, was only the second woman to graduate from Manchester University, achieving a degree in Physics and Chemistry.

Strangely, despite that scientific background, she had a lifelong belief in fairies.

Born in December 1884, at Castle Top Farm, two miles from Cromford, she was the daughter of tenant farmers.

She described herself as a “snow-baby”, for at the time of her birth the farm was cut off from civilisation by days of heavy snowfall that had blanketed the Derwent Valley below.

Although she would live out her childhood there, the 1891 census would find her staying with an uncle and aunt in Horton near Bradford. In 1901, the 16-year-old Alice is listed at the farm with her parents and younger brother. Farming was in her blood. It was something her family had done for generations.

Writing in the 1930s Alison recalled: “The life of the farm was my life. Although I stood apart in a magic circle of my own weaving, it was my environment, the only existence I understood … it was my father I saw with the plough, walking the field, my grandmother who, years before my birth, had used the spinning wheel which lay broken in the barn. It was my great-grandfather who had planted the walnut trees in the valley and the firs on the crest.”

via Little Grey Rabbit author's idyllic childhood in Cromford was a lifelong inspiration – Derby Telegraph.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: feature

David Walliams: ‘I thought I would write just one or two books – just for myself’

November 27, 2017 By achuka Leave a Comment

This feature about David Walliams has some interesting observations, particularly in regard to the lessons Wallaims says he learned from reading Roald Dahl…

While The Boy in the Dress and its successors Mr Stink and Billionaire Boy were “modest successes”, it was with his fourth book, Gangsta Granny, that Walliams made his breakthrough.

“When I wrote my first book, I was well known as someone who was on television but it didn’t immediately translate into big sales,” he recalls.

“It just grew gradually, but when Gangsta Granny came out, I really felt it change. Whenever I’d do an event, it became apparent that it wasn’t the parents dragging their children along in the hope of seeing me do some Little Britain, it was the kids dragging their parents along.”

the whole piece >>> David Walliams: ‘I thought I would write just one or two books – just for myself’ | Stuff.co.nz.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: feature, interview

New Young Voices In Poetry #1 – RUTH AWOLOLA

November 24, 2017 By achuka Leave a Comment

A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.

Ruth Awolola was born in 1998 and has been writing since 2015, when she was a winner of the SLAMbassadors UK national youth slam.

Hear her perform ‘Sorry’ the piece that impressed judges Anthony Anaxagorou and Joelle Taylor:

Earlier this month Awolola explained how she had become a poet…

Ten years ago, I remember it being World Book Day. This was the highlight of my academic year for several reasons: the book fair came to the school; we didn’t have maths lessons; and we were encouraged to go into school dressed as our favourite book characters. My brother however, who preferred running to reading, was not as enthused about the event. Two years earlier, before I joined the school, he had chosen to go as Kipper from the Biff, Chip and Kipper series. He returned home feeling defeated that day as a teaching assistant had told him he didn’t look like Kipper because Kipper wasn’t black. Every year after this he wore his latest football kit to school and cited he was a character from a book about sport that I knew he had never read. I was angry at him for not putting in any effort, sure that if he had read enough he would have found a character that looked like him. It wasn’t until I was eight years old and, despite having spent all my free time reading, couldn’t think of a black character I liked enough to dress up as, that I realised my brother wasn’t the problem.

I still struggle to think of many books with black protagonists and I assumed this was because there weren’t enough black writers. This played a role in why I initially found it so hard to start identifying myself as a poet. So few of the writers I was being encouraged to read or that we studied in class looked like me and so I developed a complex that I could not be one. It wasn’t until I was welcomed to the poetry community that I saw how diverse it really was and I met poets from all around the world. I found poetry that addressed issues I related to and I started to connect to writing more than I ever had before. I couldn’t help thinking, why couldn’t I have found this sooner?
https://mediadiversified.org/2017/11/03/how-i-became-a-poet-ruth-awolola/

Awolola’s younger bother is the subject of ‘Superpowers’, the second of her eight poems included in Rising Stars.

My littler brother loves superheroes.
He wants to change the world,
get the keys to the city and save the girl.

A couple of the poems ruminate about the vastness of space. In ‘Mainly About Aliens’

I’m looking up into the sky
And I’m thinking why is it so big?

An in ‘Love Letter To The Stars’

There are things I hate about space,
It’s far too big and unknown.
But it is my safe place,
I long to call it home.

In the biographical piece quoted from earlier Awolola confesses, “I was initially daunted about writing for a younger audience as I hadn’t really written to a brief before. The best advice I received, which applies to all writing, is to write about what concerns you. There’s no use trying to produce something that relates to people if it doesn’t relate to you. I had to remember that the person I was five years ago was still me, with similar interests and concerns.”

She has done this very well. The poems are accessible and simply worded, yet they speak of the big things that children, as they reach nine or ten years old, contemplate with such receptive minds. The longest poem – ‘On Forgetting That I am A Tree’ – is a fabulous work of empathetic imagination. Picture a teacher suggesting to his or her class, “I want you to write a poem in which you pretend you are a tree,” and receiving this in response!

Near the beginning it goes

A poem in which I fear I did not dig into the past,
Did not think about my roots,
Forgot what it meant to be planted.

A poem in which I realise they may try to cut me down,
That I must change with the seasons,
That I do it so well
It looks as if they are changing with me.

And ends

A poem in which I stop looking for it,
Because I am home.
I am habitat.
My branches are host and shelter.
I am life-giver and fruit-bearer.
Self-sufficient protection.

A poem in which I remember I am a tree.

Posts about the other poets in the collection will follow shortly.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: feature, pet, poetry

Radio Times Talks To Pullman

October 21, 2017 By achuka Leave a Comment

“The original plan was to finish all three of The Book of Dust novels before publishing them,” says Pullman, at his home in Oxfordshire. “But that fell apart because it was taking me so long to write them.” He is editing the text of the second book for publication next year, and will soon resume work on the final volume.

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-10-21/philip-pullman-la-belle-sauvage/

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: feature, interview

Philip Pullman Interviewed by Brian Appleyard For Sunday Times

October 16, 2017 By achuka Leave a Comment

The last time I saw Pullman, at his home in Cumnor, near Oxford, in early 2015, he had spoken of a follow-up trilogy called The Book of Dust. I thought he would never finish it; he looked tired and unwell. I was wrong. This month the first book in this new trilogy — La Belle Sauvage — is published….

more (beyond the firewall)> https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-interview-philip-pullman-on-the-book-of-dust-his-follow-up-to-his-dark-materials-n8s2dlflc

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: feature, interview

John Green: ‘Having OCD is an ongoing part of my life’

October 15, 2017 By achuka Leave a Comment

recommended feature interview by Alison Flood in Guardian Review

The bestselling YA author talks about the success of The Fault in Our Stars, answering his critics and writing his mental illness into fiction in his new novel, Turtles All the Way Down

via John Green: ‘Having OCD is an ongoing part of my life’ | Books | The Guardian.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: feature, interview, mental health, OCD

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • …
  • 7
  • Next Page »

Copyright ACHUKA © 2022 · designed on Genesis Framework

 

Loading Comments...