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- UK-Canada YA Literary Salon
on 07 May 2014 ( 06:30 PM )
@ Canadian High Commission, 3 Grosvenor Sq, London
Canadian-UK Young Adult Literary Salon
On 7 May 2014, the Canadian High Commission is hosting an event to celebrate Canadian authors of youth fiction living here in the UK. I'm very pleased to be part of the line-up, where I'll be appearing alongside the wonderful Moira Young (Blood Red Road) and Jeff Norton (Metawars), two other Canadian authors based in the UK. A lot of fine people came together to make this possible and they all deserve a hearty thank you. The event is part of Social Book Week, organised by Bookomi, and is in support of The Reading Agency. Last but certainly not least, the panel will be chaired by the Guardian's children's book editor, Julia Eccleshare. What did I tell you? A lot of fine people. Than
Happy World Read Aloud Day!
The first Wednesday of March is World Read Aloud Day (not to be confused with World Book Day, which happens annually on the 6th of March and which, I assure you, is every bit as thrilling). World Read Aloud Day is run by the good people of LitWorld, striving to make this planet a better one through literacy and storytelling. Kudos! This year, the (also) good people at the Canadian Children's Book Centre asked me to celebrate World Read Aloud Day by—well, reading aloud from one of my books. Obviously. It's right there in the name of the day. The first thing I did was hire myself a handsome wig of dreadlocks...which was only the beginning. Soon I had an eighteenth century frock coat, a
Blues for Zoey is published—today
Good news everyone: Today is the day Penguin/Razorbill Canada publishes my new novel, Blues For Zoey. In my valiant and continued fight against categorisation, this book is a departure from everything that preceded it—i.e. a pair of comic fantasy novels-in-verse for young readers; a hardboiled fairy tale; and a newfangled, "transmedia" collaboration with a special effects company. Here we have a whole new animal. Blues for Zoey began as an idea I had for a coming-of-age story about money, rather than sex (although both are well enough represented). As the novel progressed, music and murder slipped in there, as well as the choice to give the protagonist an ambiguous, mixed ethnicityâ
The Greatest / Saddest / Oddest Events of 2013
Happy New Year, everyone. Welcome to the year two-thousand fourteen! Well. That makes it official: I can now no longer distinguish between the present and future. Everything after "2014" sounds like science-fiction. But let's not forget the past. Here are—in my humble opinion—the more interesting things that happened in 2013. 1. The Formosan clouded leopard declared extinct After a 13 year study in the forests of Taiwan, the Formosan clouded leopard was officially declared extinct in the spring of last year. The last live sighting was in 1983, by a group of indigenous hunters. Ironically, those hunters consider it taboo to hunt the animal. The leopards went extinct in the usual way, f
Book Trailer for Prince Puggly of Spud and the Kingdom of Spiff (with lemmings)
Okay. So, yes. Technically, I'm a bit late with this. Prince Puggly of Spud and the Kingdom of Spiff was published waaaay back in February and it's now December. That's ten months too late for a book trailer to adequately serve its purpose, but hey...better late than never, right? Right? In any case, here's a little...ahem..."book trailer" for a book I published nearly a year ago. But seriously, who's counting? (Me, apparently. cf. the previous paragraph, the "ten months" bit.) On the upside, this video has lemmings. How can you not love lemmings? Lemmings!