Author Abie Longstaff writes about her exciting visit to Hong Kong to promote Pirate House Swap and The Fairytale Hairdresser:
In April I was lucky enough to get to share my work with children in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is my childhood home and the place where I spent many hours making up games and stories for my sisters. Some of these games and stories went on to become picture books, so for me it was almost like bringing my ideas full circle right back to the place they began.
I brought two books with me: The Fairytale Hairdresser and Pirate House Swap, as well as all my props and sketch books. The children loved hearing about Kittie Lacey’s hair salon and they queued up to brush Rapunzel’s hair. One of the bookshops, Bookazine, teamed my story reading with a hair styling and nail painting, so the children got to listen to the story of Kittie’s salon and join in the fun!
I was surprised how many Hong Kong children recognised the fairy tale characters in the book – they loved spotting them in Lauren Beard’s beautiful illustrations, and shouted their names out with great enthusiasm as soon as they recognised them.
The pirates had their turn too and the children unpacked a bag of clues – a pirate flag, a hat and some trousers, an eye patch and some gold coins. Hmm – who could these belong to?
As usual, my sketchbooks were a big hit. I find children love hearing about the writing process, and I keep all my edits and thumbnails to show them, as well as my (very poor) drawings, which I make as I write to help me pace the story.
Thanks to all the lovely children who made my visits so fun, and thank you to the book shops for having me. I’ll be back!
Abie Longstaff
Abie was the talk of the town!
Abie reads from The Fairytale Hairdresser
Children were captivated as Abie read her two brilliant books
The summer festival season is almost upon us! (I know – it doesn’t feel much like summer, does it?!)
It’s so exciting working in publicity as we get to go out and about all the time with our lovely authors. The festivals are are a real highlight as not only do you get to go to some wonderful places around the UK like Bath and Edinburgh, you get to experience the green rooms and author’s yurts where some very famous faces reside for a few weeks!
Every festival has a different feel to it and the first one up to kick off our summer season is Hay. And what a festival it is! Such a beautiful place, full of wonderful bookshops (apparently 30 bookshops in such a small place – amazing!) and, of course, fantastic events. This year, we have a huge line up of talks and signings so you really should treat yourself to a visit. The festival runs from 31st May to 10th June.
Check out the website for tickets to book your tickets to see CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI, JACQUELINE WILSON, SIMON MAYO, THE ETHERINGTON BROTHERS, SUSIE DAY, LINDSEY BARRACLOUGH, MITCH SYMONS, MATT HAIG, LOUISE YATES, ALIEN INVADERS, and PAUL STEWART & CHRIS RIDDELL!
Tributes are pouring in to honour the much-loved children’s author Maurice Sendak, who very sadly passed away yesterday at the age of 83, shortly after suffering a stroke.
Born in Brooklyn in 1928, Maurice Sendak has become known as one of the world’s most groundbreaking and influential author-illustrators. His is best known for Where the Wild Things Are, which has sold around 20 million copies; been made into a film; and won the 1964 Caldecott Medal, the most prestigious award in the USA for a children’s picture book. It is the story of young Max, who is sent to bed without supper and then goes on a journey through his imagination to the land of the wild things.
As we approach the landmark 50 years of this iconic book in 2013, it is extremely sad that Maurice Sendak will not be here. MD of Random House Children’s Publishers, Philippa Dickinson, says, ‘Maurice Sendak has astonished and delighted generations of children around the world with his remarkable books and we mourn the passing of such a huge talent.’
This comment has been echoed many times, on both sides of the Atlantic, over the past 24 hours. Here in the UK, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times, The Independent and The Scotsman have all published obituaries to the man who has been hailed as “the Picasso of children’s book’” (as quoted in The Daily Telegraph, 09.05.12). Pieces also ran in the Sun, the Mirror and Metro today, honouring Maurice Sendak as not only a bestselling author but a unique and powerful voice in children’s literature, psychology, and culture.
Further afield, the International Herald Tribune describes Maurice Sendak as “widely considered one of the most important children’s book artists of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery”; while Wall Street Journal discusses how Sendak’s “landmark” books helped children to confront their fears in a remarkable way.
Amid the sadness of losing such an irreplaceable talent, we also marvel at an astonishing career, by which children’s books – and indeed the whole of literature – has been so greatly enriched.
The breadth of response can be viewed online via the links below:
The UK book tour for Alice Miranda, by Australian author Jacqueline Harvey, started today with a fabulous day of events in London.
Jacqueline had children listening attentively to stories of Alice Miranda’s adventures, hilarious anecdotes about her characters, how she came up with the idea for the series and even had some students acting!
Three years ago when I was expecting a baby, I was very excited and a bit scared too. I don’t know if it was the fear and excitement or the new teetotal lifestyle I found my self living but I felt like my head was bubbling with ideas for stories. It was while I watched my tummy get bigger that I wrote a book called Wanda and the Alien. It’s about two very unusual friends. They meet when the aliens rocket crash lands in the wood where a little rabbit called Wanda lives, and although they don’t speak the same language they get on like a house on fire!
My other half Paul suggested the name Wanda for our offspring (if we ever had one) on a country walk soon after we met (I thought this rather forward) anyway I loved the name, so much so that I gave it to the rabbit in the story, and then when the bump turned into a person we gave it to her too! So there are two Wandas in my life and strangely they are very alike. I don’t mean my little girl has bunny ears and a tail or anything but they do share a lot of the same character traits. Both Wandas are fiercely independent, compassionate, and full of fun. They both love inventing things, making up songs and having adventures.
I wonder if in her life person Wanda will meet an alien? I wouldn’t be surprised! if she did I think she’d be very friendly and welcoming like rabbit Wanda.
In the first book that came out in May 2010 Wanda introduces her new friend the alien to her world, in the second book, out this week, the alien takes Wanda to his home. Wanda discovers that they do things rather differently on the alien planet.
I’m having fun finding out what the friends get up to in their 3rd adventure, I’m working on that now. For these books I’m lucky enough to have the scope of the whole universe and at the heart of it a very special friendship between two characters that feel very real to me.
Sue Hendra, author of Wanda and the Alien and Wanda’s Space Party
The amazing Mini Grey delighted a room full of children at The Book Nook in Hove this Saturday.
She told her rapt audience of her love of bringing food to life and making it ‘run around’. She explained how in her books; peas, spoons and dishes can all come to life! She drew a slice of toast who had come alive and was chasing some very frightened rice crispies around the breakfast table.
She also showed the children some fantastic zig-zag books she’d made where creatures and adventures can literally jump off of the page.
Mini finished up by talking about Traction Man and reading the cautionary tale of Jim, Who Ran Away from his Nurse, and Was Eaten by a Lion.
Last night we very proudly hosted a special evening dedicated to our wonderful range of picture books.
We invited a wide range of booksellers, journalists, teachers, librarians, bloggers, and others interested in brilliant picture books to be presented with highlights from our exciting line-up for this year, and to meet our very special guests: Jez Alborough, Quentin Blake, Alexis Deacon, Mini Grey (sadly not pictured here!), Kali Stileman and Louise Yates.
Jez Alborough read from his new picture book, Six Little Chicks, to a crowd which was possibly a little older than his normal readings, but no less enthralled.
Then Louise Yates and Quentin Blake discussed all things picture book “in conversation”. This was an incredible insight into the creative process, and I think I speak for all of us when I say I could have listened to them all night!
Despite the pouring rain and icy cold, inside it was all about spring, with bunting, tulips, and lots of exciting sketchbooks, artwork, props and sneaky peeks of new projects on display. Mini even brought her very own Traction Man, Scrubbing Brush, and Beach-Time Brenda, complete with sausage monster picnic to protect…
Altogether it was a fantastic and fascinating evening; a brilliant opportunity for us to shout about the books we love, and to share them with other picture-booklovers. Look out for what’s coming next from RHCP…
It’s finally here – the Princess Poppy Picture Books app! We’ve been working on this very hard for a long while here at RHCP, alongside our brilliant developers Robot Media, and today is the day it goes live in the iTunes App Store.
The app contains three books – Ballet Shoes, The Birthday and Twinkletoes – along with activities like colouring and stickering. Ballet Shoes is ready to read as soon as you buy the app, and the other two books can be unlocked with in-app purchases. You’ll also get regular letters from Poppy, delivered directly to your iPad, iPod or iPhone!
I’m enjoying designing my own ball gowns. Go get the app here!
I wrote my first book in primary school. Well, it felt like a book at the time, probably a dozen or so pages, with really cool pencil pictures of the shadow monster by my friend Vincent. It was a great success. Our teacher, Mrs Dixon, liked it, anyway.
So it’s been a bit of a lifelong dream of mine, this book lark. And here we are, a mere 40 or so years later, with the publication of Grymm imminent and me as excited now as I was then.
Grymm, I hope, is like nothing you’ve read before. So much so that I’ve been having trouble describing it. It’s got mad butcher Cleaver Flay, two-legged dogs, a one-legged chicken, a huge, sticky baker called Malahide Fleur, a tornado and two children who despise each other but hate their half-brother, Bryan, even more.
As you can see, it’s about love. Ha ha ha ha!
Grymm started life many, many years ago as a line in a notebook. I was travelling somewhere (a lot of my ideas come when I am out of my comfort zone) and wrote this: “Two children go to live in a perfect English village and gradually realise that everyone who lives there is a nursery rhyme character.”
That was it. And it sat there for years and years and years, seemingly doing nothing, forgotten. So, let’s forget it, too, for a while.
Eventually I moved to Australia and began exploring that amazing, wide, hot, red-earthed country where 22 million people are ‘crammed’ in to a continent that’s bigger than Europe (750 million people).
This means there’s a lot of space in Australia. One of the great things to do is drive into the Outback where there’s nothing to see but red dust and the horizon for 360 degrees. The feeling this engenders made its way into Grymm: “It is an eerie feeling to stop, as many travellers do, and realise that you can see the curve of the Earth. Eerie and more than a little frightening.”
It was on one of these trips in the middle of nowhere that my partner and I came across an abandoned shop, in a small town called Coleraine, that had a note pinned to the door. The note explained that this was where cosmetics giant Helena Rubinstein began her empire.
Here? Out here in the middle of nowhere? How weird was that? We looked up and down the wide main street. It was hot, hot, hot and … empty.
I made another note in another notebook. It, too, sat around doing nothing.
And then, much later again, I decided to take some time off from my newspaper work and try to write a book. It didn’t go well. While waiting for the muse to strike I bought the collected works of the Brothers Grimm. The original tales, mind, with all their tragedy and terror, not the sanitised versions we’re used to. In these stories Cinderella’s ugly sisters get their eyes pecked out by pigeons at the wedding. And what happens in The Goose Girl has to be read to be believed – and you can find out by reading the Beersheba Bluehammer chapter in Grymm.
That’s when it suddenly came to me: all the seemingly forgotten notes, the ideas, the imaginings, came together. The children from the English village would be children from an unnamed city moving to a small town on the edge of a desert; what they encountered there would be as bizarre as finding Helena Rubinstein’s first shop; and I would try to write a story as full of terror and harsh beauty as the Grimm fairytales but set in bright, blazing, relentless sunlight. Darkness, I decided, would hide behind the brightest light.
And so Grymm was born. If you do get round to reading it, see if you can spot the references to the original stories.
Welcome to our new UK Random House Children's Books blog. You'll find behind-the-scenes talk from us, our authors, illustrators & events... and news on the latest cakes from the publicity department!
