This week’s post from RLF Consultant Fellow Amanda Swift: Can you express the central idea or argument of what you’re planning to write, in a couple of sentences spoken aloud? This short but effective exercise works for both academic and creative writing. It will test the project’s roadworthiness before you start. You don’t need to …
Reading books is one of the most important routes to academic success for children, yet 1 in 8 disadvantaged children don’t own a single book. That’s what Maz Evans from Book Buddy explained at the Bookseller Children’s Conference in October 2018. Library closures The real solution to the problem is for the government to …
Yesterday, I was delighted to be selected as the winner of the 2018 Educational Writer’s Award, organised by ALCS and the Society of Authors, for Far From Home: Refugees and Migrants Fleeing War, Persecution & Poverty. The shortlist included a fine selection of books on themes of great interest and importance to young people: loos …
There’s going to be a documentary about the 14 ships stranded in the Suez Canal during the Six-Day War. I Catch Productions I Catch Productions are making the film for Al Jazeera. They are currently in the UK interviewing former seafarers who lived through the experience of being marooned on the merchant ships as war …
I was lucky enough to attend the Bookseller conference on children’s non-fiction last month, and that was one of the conclusions. We children’s non-fiction writers always feel like second-class citizens because when people talk about children’s books, they usually mean fiction. But with the renewed popularity of highly illustrated information titles and a …
Every year, Siegfried Hellwig organises a reunion of seafarers who worked on the German ship Nordwind – one of the ships that was marooned in the Great Bitter Lake for 8 years. Günter Schütt kindly sent me a photo of the gathering in Olberg.
I’m delighted to announce that I have finally produced an eBook of ‘Stranded in the Six-Day War’, the tale of the 14 merchant ships marooned in the Suez Canal at the start of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. I wanted to make my title available at low cost so that more people can find out about …
I write many children’s non-fiction books but some are particularly special to me. Far From Home: Refugees Fleeing War, Persecution and Poverty is one of them. The crisis in context Commissioned by Franklin Watts in 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe, it felt like an important book to write – …
I’m looking forward to exhibiting my children’s book about refugees, ‘Far From Home’, on the Amnesty International stall at the Great Get Together event, this Sunday 24 June at Brighton Dome. I’m hoping that educators will want to purchase it to spark discussions with young people about why millions are forced to flee their countries …