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Alan Garner Interview – The Observer

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One of the things missed during ACHUKA’s month-long break in August was this significant interview with Alan Garner in The Observer….

When you finished Boneland, the final instalment in the trilogy that began with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, you said it would be your last book. How did you come to write Where Shall We Run To?
I can’t stop writing. It’s not something I physically enjoy, but I can’t switch off the head. There was something else, something I’d lived with all my life – the fear that I wouldn’t live to finish a given piece. Having finished Boneland at the age of 77, with no idea in front of me whatever, I thought – that’s it. And then an idea started to stir. Now, given that it takes me between five and nine years to write a novel, the joke runs a bit sour when you’re in your early 80s.

For the full interview, if you all missed it at the time:
>>>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/04/alan-garner-interview-i-just-let-the-voice-settle-and-listened-memoir-where-shall-we-run-to

Penelope Lively Feature in FT

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It was while reading to her own children, she says, that the idea of authorship came to her. “I got very interested in children’s books, I still am. I began to think, ‘Perhaps I could do that?’ ”So in 1970 she wrote Astercote, about a deserted village in a wood that guards an ancient secret, the first of some 30 books for children that spanned her career until 2001. Just three years later came her Carnegie Medal, for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, a fantasy complete with poltergeist and 17th-century spook, which she still describes as her favourite among her own books.

via Penelope Lively: ‘Every writer I know is a hungry reader’ | Financial Times.

Tied Up: David Fickling Feature Interview In Bookseller (Recommended)

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When I suggest the bow tie is good branding, he demurs. “I don’t believe in branding, I believe in hallmarking,” he says. “To me, the etymology of a brand is ownership: singeing a mark on a cow. When, say, a goldsmith hallmarks something, they are saying: ‘I made this at this particular time and it is a thing of quality and it works.’ That’s what I think we do with everything we publish.”

Full piece >>> https://www.thebookseller.com/insight/tied-752126

Terry Deary ST Magazine 25th Anniversary of Horrible Histories Feature

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I’ve only just come across this feature from last weekend’s Sunday Times Magazine.

It’s a well-constructed piece by Matt Rudd about Terry Deary and his Horrible Histories colleague Martin Brown, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the series, “aimed at 8-to-12ers, that wonderful age when your children read autonomously and you can, finally, have some you-time.” 

Today, when I meet him and Brown at their publisher, the irascible 72-year-old is quoting Primo Levi within five minutes. “It’s the duty of righteous men to make war against all undeserved privilege,” he says. “And that’s what we do. We make war against the undeserved privilege. I want children to understand that people in alleged power are not necessarily entitled to it. That’s why it’s odd having Horrible Histories adopted by schools. Don’t these teachers understand that we’re training kids to question authority? And they use them in schools. Bizarre. Occasionally somebody picks it up and understands, then sends me offensive emails.”

He is amused when I tell him my eldest son has become something of a flag-burning socialist since reading his books. “Don’t worry,” he says. “He’ll get balance. The schools will teach the conventional stuff. We are the counterbalance.”

Recommend reading the whole piece, if you have a means  of getting past the paywall:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/horrible-histories-interview-terry-deary-martin-brown-cgvh6x065

Feathers Would Fly – Guardian Report On Lifetime Achievement Award

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Despite being married for more than 50 years, [Burningham & Oxenbury] have collaborated on only one book – 2010’s There’s Going to Be a Baby. “It’s much easier if we don’t really,” said Burningham, who works on the ground floor of their home, while Oxenbury has an outside studio. They do show each other drawings that they aren’t quite happy with. “I’ll say to John, ‘What do you think of this?’ And it’ll be something that has proved to be very difficult and I’ve spent a long time over it, and all he says is, ‘Absolutely no good.’ It’s terribly depressing and you have to start again. And I do the same for him.”

“Absolutely, yes,” said Burningham. “We can take it in small doses, but if we worked in the same studio it would be dreadful.” “Feathers would fly,” said Oxenbury.

via Helen Oxenbury and John Burningham win top books honour | Books | The Guardian.

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

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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.

The Books Interview: Katherine Rundell makes a brave confession

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Writing children’s books was initially a choice Rundell made because she felt it could be a training ground for her as an author. “I didn’t feel that I had been an adult for long enough to write something as good as I wanted it to be,” she says. “My great hero growing up was Jane Austen and I wanted to write something both big and compact in the way she does, and I was aware that that was so beyond my capabilities that I thought children’s fiction would be a place where I could learn how to write. And now if anyone said that to me I would be livid, the idea that children’s fiction is a place where you learn and move on, I think that is entirely mistaken. But that was how I started.

>>> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/06/katherine-rundell-only-time-kids-understand-world-when-they-read

Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler: The books interview

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published in The Guardian prince edition 23 Dec, and online 22 Dec – the interview mainly concentrates on Donaldson but this Scheffler tidbit is interesting:

The orange-eyed Gruffalo “with his terrible claws and terrible teeth” is clearly a descendant of one of Maurice Sendak’s yellow-eyed Wild Things, with “their terrible teeth” and “terrible claws” (but somehow less scary). “Maurice Sendak is a great illustrator, but I was never a great Sendak fan. He was not an influence and I didn’t think of him when I drew the Gruffalo,” Scheffler says. “Honestly.”

Surprisingly perhaps, he didn’t have many picture books as a child and was more interested in comics; his childhood love of nature is clear in his drawings. His work owes more to a European tradition, and from his richly detailed, slightly spooky fairytale backgrounds, you wouldn’t have to know that he drew studies from Hamburg forests and German towns, to guess at his roots. He cites the French artist Tomi Ungerer as the greater inspiration (“We have the same eyes in our pictures! I loved his cartoony style”). His instinct is always to go darker – legend has it that he takes revenge on his characters by sketching them meeting unfortunate ends. When Donaldson interjects to ask if he ever gets cross when people interfere with his drawings, he replies only when an editor suggests an image is unsuitable for children, such as the sawing off of a unicorn’s horn.

>>> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/22/julia-donaldson-axel-scheffler-gruffalo-nterview

Oliver Jeffers Interviewed By Digital Arts

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Oliver’s latest book, Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth, isn’t a story but an introduction to the world for his first child – written and illustrated in the first few months of his son’s life.

[Digital Arts] caught up with Oliver on a recent press tour to promote the book, and interviewed him about his creative process and approach to mark making and composition – and how different it was to work on a non-fiction book with a very particular audience in mind. 

Highly recommended link…
There is a video presentation of the interview (just under 10 minutes in length) and an edited transcript.

“I was never able to draw using a [graphics] tablet,” he says, “because it’s an unusual thing to be looking at the screen at something being created that’s actually happening with your hand. I tried it a couple of times [and thought], ‘No. It feels unnatural.’

He did find some advantages to working on an iPad though.

“You can zoom in, which is a huge advantage,” he says. “You can’t do that with an actual piece of paper.

“It’s strange because there’s zero friction. Whenever you’re drawing with a pencil across a piece of paper, there’s texture, drag, resistance. It’s just not there, and that’s a strange sensation, which I don’t know if you’ll ever really get used to.”

 

via Oliver Jeffers on how he illustrates picture books children (and adults) love – Features – Digital Arts.