Not to miss: Read for the world at the Irish Writers Centre

I'll miss it as it's tomorrow and I'll be busy tucking in more Parisian delicacies, but it sounds deadly!

The Irish Writers' Centre are attempting to break the world record for "most authors reading consecutively from their own books"! From Friday 15th June at 10am right through to Bloomsday 16th June at 2pm, 111 writers (including children's favourites Sarah Webb, John Boyne, Carlo Gébler, Conor Kostick, Alan Nolan, Jane Mitchell, Marita Conlon-McKenna, Sarah Rees Brennan, 2012 CBI Awards shortlistee Roddy Doyle and winner of the CBI Book of the Year Award Celine Kiernan) will read for 15 minutes each, for 28 hours straight! Phew! The event will be broadcast LIVE online at www.writerscentre.ie.

Bistoing again

And what a joy it is! For the third time running I've been given the chance to be part of the Bisto Book of the Year Award jury. Check out who my distinguished colleagues are on the new-look Children's Books Ireland website.
Plenty to keep us busy this year as Irish writers, illustrators and publishers have been very productive. There will be in particular a lot of novels coming from brand new publishers such as Hachette Ireland and Puffin Ireland.

RTEJr Radio's Little Pages

A new programme is hitting the interether this very morning on digital radio RTEJr. Little Pages, presented by Gráinne Clear, will look at children's book from around the world and around the block, from picturebooks to teen novels, classics to the latest thing. There's also a series of podcasts for parents in the pipeline, discussing topics such as "how picture books work, why children like to be scared, the childhood love of the grotesque and bizarre, and many other themes which will help parents understand the workings of children’s books".
The show is on every Sunday at 9am and repeated on Fridays at 5pm. You can listen to the station here for example.

Give you picturebook a good shake

Saw this video on the inis blog and had to share it. Artist Raghava KK gives this inspiring talk at a TED event about changing our perspectives through stories that morph at the shake of an ipad... Brillig!

Inspiring

I suppose you've never heard of Jean-Philippe Arrou-Vignod. He's French and has written a heap of children's books and some adult ones, too. His thing is mainly humour and detective stories, one often going with the other, of course. His only works published in English so far are the Rita and Whatsit series, about a little girl and her dog, who doesn't have a name, but who has plenty of attitude to compensate. Arrou-Vignod also wrote a series of novels for 9+ about his own family life in the late 1960s, which is in the league of Nicholas for humour and quirkiness and which reminded me somewhat of Eoin Colfer's Legends series. I was reading an interview Arrou-Vignod did for a non-fiction book about the power of story in children's literature and I found myself very much taken by his philosophy. Here's what he has to say:
"I like the 8-12 age group. It's the end of early childhood, but at the same time the children are not autonomous yet and they haven't entered the complex world of love relationships. They are too young, I think, to be given a realistic and worrying image of our world... As a children's writer, I believe I have a responsibility: to give young people books that make them want to live life, books that give them energy."
"Joy" and even "euphoria" also come up in this interview. "Reading makes you want to live" Arrou-Vignod concludes. "Living makes you want to write". Let's get our pens and books, then!

Tell me what you read...

I haven't been very talkative about my reading over the past few months as I was mostly reading for the Bisto Book of the Year Award and It Was All A Secret. But now that the shortlist has been announced, I have more time to read Other Things, and one of them is...
Letters to Anyone and Everyone, by Toon Tellegen, illusrated by Jessica Ahlberg.
I've had my eye on this one for some time and I must say I'm not disappointed. Squirrel, Ant, Bear and the others write letters to each other about all sorts of things (mostly cake in Bear's case) and about nothing (literally). In Tellegen's world, your letters are delivered by the wind, you can write to people, tables and... letters. And the best thing is, you'll always get an answer.
Letters to Anyone and Everyone is both quiet and exciting; it's light on its dancing feet and secretly serious; and it is (perhaps unexpectedly given the unconnected nature of the letters) quite the page-turner. A treat.

To begin with...

Sometimes, writers can prove frightfully original. Take me, for instance, on this alarmingly blustery January night. I've decided to properly begin blogging, with my first proper post, and I've decided to write it on... well, beginnings.
The first few lines of a book, as we all know, are what makes you buy it, borrow it or hide it under your jumper and hurry out of your best friend's house saying you left something in the oven or baby in the bath or vice versa.
So here are some my fave openings at the moment:

• Just in Case by Meg Rosoff. Within four or five pages, we've met the hero, the villain, the helper, the dog and envisaged every possible disaster that can befall humanity. Phenomenal.
• The Death Collector by Justin Richards. "Four days after his own funeral, Albert Wilkes came home for tea". Now, if that doesn't grab your attention, what does?
• A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas. The first sentence is as long as a midwinter night and yet easy and cosy as a fireside on said night. To me that opening describes exactly how memory (mine anyway) works: it doesn't. It's just a constant meandering between bits and pieces, where the big picture is at once lost and retained: ''... I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six."
• The Jolly Postman by Alan and Janet Ahlberg. "Once upon a bicycle,/ So they say,/ A Jolly Postman came one day..." How can you resist? As a writer of picturebooks myself, I'm forever fighting against the easy "once upon a time" option. So far (with about 20 stories out there), I've only used it once, but that was at my editor's request.
• The Lightning Key by Jon Berkeley. "Listen: rain is falling, and what a rain! A billion beads of cold sky slant down through the night..." That rain is music and it's movement and it has me wondering whether I left the skylight above my desk open...
• The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness. "The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say." What can I say?
• The Seeing Stone by Kevin Crossley-Holland. A different affair altogether, but the voice is as distinctive and as convincing as that of Ness' narrator, and from the very first paragraph too.
• The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett. Definitely one of the funniest and cleverest books I've read. "As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were and who were the rats." There's at least four interruptions on the first half page and we're introduced to no less than three characters with deliciously odd names. Tentalizing or what?
• The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean. Another powerful voice, that of Sym who is ironically so powerless when it comes to action. Here's the first paragraph: "I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now - which is ridiculous, since he's been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I'll be dead, too, and then the age difference won't matter."

Just open these books on the first page and I dare you not to read more!