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That speech I gave in full… – Patrick Ness – Diary

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In the wake of the discussion provoked by his and other authors’ speeches at the launch of the Imagine Festival, Patrick Ness has decided to publish the full text of his speech on his website. I quote only from his intro, leaving you to click through to transcript itself:

I wasn’t going to publish this anywhere, because a speech is a speech, not an essay. You publish it and it loses all intonation, tone, improvisation, jokes, etc.  But as the discussion about the speech I gave Monday to open the Imagine Festival keeps coming up (along with certain folks reactions to it), I give it to you here without comment (except to say that Putin line is, let’s call it, “satire”).

 

http://www.patrickness.com/2014/02/that-speech-i-gave-in-full.html

Patrick Ness in the Mail’s What Book Feature

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Patrick Ness is the latest guest in the Mail’s ‘What Book’ featurette:

..FIRST GAVE YOU THE READING BUG?

That would be my very first book ever: Richard Scarry’s Storybook Dictionary. It was the book where shapes suddenly became letters and letters suddenly became words. That amazing moment when you realise, ‘Hey, I’m reading!’

via Find out WHAT BOOK gave children’s author PATRICK NESS the reading bug | Mail Online.

More Than This by Patrick Ness – Guardian Review

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Guardian Review

More Than This by Patrick Ness, reviewed by Tony Bradman

GuardianPatrick Ness is very, very good at beginnings. I thought it would be hard to match the opening line of The Knife of Never Letting Go: “The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs dont got nothing much to say.” But he managed it in the second and third books of the Chaos Walking trilogy, as well as in the multi-award-winning A Monster Calls. Now hes outdone himself. His latest novel for teenagers starts with a sentence that had me instantly hooked: “Here is the boy, drowning.”
… …
I have a feeling More Than This might cause a few collywobbles among some grown-ups because it features a gay relationship, so I suppose that puts it firmly in Young Adult territory. There’s nothing explicit, though, just Ness’s trademark tenderness for his characters, good and bad. It does have a couple of flaws – it’s a bit long and the characters talk a lot, especially in the second half. That’s OK, though, because what they say is interesting even when it slows things down.

And yes, Ness is very, very good at endings, too – this one has a corker. I might just have to start a collection of his last lines, as well as his first.

via More Than This by Patrick Ness – review | Books | The Guardian.