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Living in Cardiff, and being a children’s author, it is difficult to escape the ghost of Roald Dahl, the man my first publisher described, without evidence, as “the world’s number one storyteller”. This is certainly not how I see this entitled reactionary, as I made it clear when opposing the Labour Cardiff council spending a
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The ancient town of Llantresedd is home to two shops owned by the wealthy Jac Dekker: the upmarket Ruby Street store, which sells prestige dragons at premium prices, and the backstreet Toadstool Lane store, which sells derisory second quality dragons. Caron, a young teenager, works at Toadstool Lane as a junior sales girl. She has
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I was not brought up in a left-wing home. Far from it. My mum came from a rural working-class family who lived in a world where the lord of the manor still ruled – even though he’d become Lord Iliffe by owning newspapers. My grandad worked as one of his gardeners and the house they
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I wrote my first novel in 1976 and was first published in 1984. In between I had written maybe half a million words, graduated, teacher trained, and worked for five years as a comprehensive school and FE teacher. But this, of course, was before the age of the internet and self-publishing, an age which has
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My first published novel, Yatesy’s Rap, as I have written elsewhere, was eagerly seized upon by Puffin as a book which working-class teenagers might relate to. The same applied to a set of stories, Showdown, which Puffin also published in their new Puffin Plus series. But I had another book I wanted to write, a
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A perennial question asked of authors is ‘where do you get your ideas from?’. I’m always tempted to return the question, because everyone has ideas, just as everyone has a dream-life where all kinds of strange associations are made and unconscious storylines plotted. And very often I’ll wake from my dream-world with an image in
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My first year of teaching was a hellish experience. I had spent three years studying under radical educationalist Ian Lister at York and knew all there was to know about deschooling, freeschooling and reschooling. I was familiar with A.S .Neill’s famously experimental school Summerhill, and also the attempts to liberalise education at state schools such
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In 1996 I was commissioned to write the first of a series of historical stories for Franklin Watts. The stories would fit in with the national curriculum and bring to life important historical episodes in an entertaining and memorable way. The first story was to be about the London blitz: not a huge undertaking, but
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