Contact, Links and Visits
You can contact me through the
form below.
If you give your email address, I'll try to reply to you.
Publisher Links:
- Egmont
- The Chicken House
- Bloomsbury
- Barrington Stoke
- Oxford University Press (educational)
- Franklin Watts
- Random House (kids)
- Barn Owl Books
- A & C Black
School and Library visits:
I enjoy visiting school and libraries to talk to children and work with children. I’m happy with children of nursery age up to Year 6, sharing stories and thinking about where ideas come from, what a story is, how to write it, how books are made, and so on. Do feel free to contact me and discuss with no obligation. I charge £350 for a full day and £200 for just a morning. I’m also an experienced teacher of adults who want to write for children. Based in Leicester, I charge 45p per mile travel expenses (or train fare) for anywhere outside Leicestershire, but nothing for travel within the county.
I’m sometimes amazed at the inventive ideas dreamed-up by teachers and librarians I meet when I make school visits, and I thought that they might be of interest to others. But please do be aware that most of most of my school visits are a simple matter of me sharing stories and ideas, and answering questions, with groups of children. Simply introducing the children to a book or two of mine, and perhaps showing them this website, before I come is ample preparation unless you want to do something more elaborate.
One school did a whole term’s art project based on You Choose. They took one picture spread a week, and then developed ideas from it; drawing food on paper plates, making travel posters, designing shoes, and all sorts. They then took over an empty local shop, and made a great display of all their work for local people to enjoy.
I’ve seen wonderful ‘patchwork pictures’ on walls based on You Choose, and a whole book similarly made out of a mass of small square pictures by each child in a school. In that book, each class created one double-page spread. The result was stunning!
In an assembly I’ve been shown a wall covered in yellow Post-It notes carrying questions from children in the school. I took some at random to answer, adding a nice lucky-dip element of excitement for the children waiting to see whose questions would be picked.
In one school the Year One class did a whole week’s work based on What’s In Store? The teacher had managed to make it work across the whole curriculum – shopping for maths, the question of ‘stranger danger’ for PSE, up and down steps for PE, and of course lots of artwork and writing and acting.
Lots of schools download the teaching ideas and resources that were created by a team of experienced teachers, based on my novel Flow. They can be found on the Activities part of this website, as can a colouring picture and word search about Winnie The Witch.
One school was living a story the week that I was there. The children had arrived on Monday morning to find a large nest made of big sticks. It was in their playground, and had to be cordoned-off. There was much speculation about what might have made such a nest. Next day there was a large egg in the nest (made of modeling clay rather than paper mache, so as not to go soggy in rain!). What might hatch from that? The younger children were really excited, while the older ones were a bit more skeptical … until they found ‘bird poo’ (white paint) dribbled down their classroom window on the Wednesday morning! Hmm. What had been sitting on their roof? And the egg had lines around it, suggesting it was about to crack. That was the day of my visit, so I never did find what, if anything, did ‘hatch’ out in the end. But I did see some really wonderful artwork and writing and drama work based on the children’s ideas of what kind of bird or animal might have arrived in their school.
I’m sometimes interviewed by two or three children who want to write up their interview for a school newspaper or website.
I often find myself in schools full of strange people as whole schools dress as book characters as part of Book Week fun. A lot of teachers choose to dress as Winnie The Witch – it must provide some kind of therapy for them!
Some schools have used the little stories I tell on this website about my own primary school life as a prompt for children to write little true stories about their own lives.
In one school, everybody in the school had read one of my books over half term, and that included the teachers whose classes I wasn’t visiting! The teachers had all been instructed to read my adult novel, Spectacles, and they had lots of questions to ask me in the staffroom!
I’m happy to bring books to sell in the school if I’m coming to you by car. Or a local bookshop may be happy to supply books for children to buy. It adds something durable to the day if children get the chance to buy and read and keep a book they’ve become enthused about. Of course I’m very happy to sign books. If children don’t want to buy, or can’t afford to buy, then it’s nice if they can find the books that they’ve heard about in their school library, so still have the chance to read the books for themselves. However, I do understand that arranging for children to bring money to school, or parents to bring money at the end of the day, can add hassle, so don’t feel you have to have a book sale unless you want to.
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