David Almond
Merging "memory and dream, the real and the imagined, truths and lies," David Almond's atmospheric books are set against a backdrop of distinctly British landscapes. Although the author's settings are "twisted into something imaginary," they are all rooted in "specific North England places" that Almond has intimately known. "It seems that the more tightly I focus on one spot [in stories], the more able I am to reach a broad audience," says the author of seven books and one play. "I think that if I were to try to work with more universal material, I would run into many obstacles." His earliest stories for children (compiled in the recently published autobiography, Counting Stars) contain perhaps the most "specific" locale of all. Readers are taken into the heart of the tiny, tight-knit, predominantly Catholic village where Almond grew up. They are introduced to a younger version of the writer and invited to join him on his quest to find answers to questions about religion, death and immortality.
Although the author had in mind a small audience (his brothers and sisters) while writing his autobiographical stories, the selections found in Counting Stars have received a "heartening reception" all over Europe and abroad. Last spring, Almond had the opportunity to meet some of his young American fans when he made his second coast-to-coast United States tour, stopping at libraries and schools in such cities as New York, San Francisco, Chicago and New Orleans.
"I feel liberated writing for children," Almond explains. "Children are more willing to accept possibilities. They're not cynical. They don't expect everything to be salted with irony."
Almond, who began his career with two adult novels, never set out to become a children's author, but he "began uncovering things" from his childhood when writing down his first autobiographical vignettes. One of the treasures that he excavated was an idea for his first children's novel, Skellig, which was published four years before Counting Stars. "Writing from a child's point of view set me on a new path," recalls Almond, who has never regretted the course he chose to take. "My main goal in writing for young readers is to keep them engaged, to draw them into the world of the book so that they feel more deeply and look more deeply."
Almond believes that the recent surge of British children's novels being brought to the U.S. is part of a larger "cross-fertilization" process occurring in all corners of the literary world, and is quick to point out that "more American books are coming into Great Britain as well." He is appreciative of the inspiration he received from several American writers, including Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor (who, according to Almond, "taught me how to write about locality and religious imagery").
Despite the current international exchange of ideas available to authors, Almond acknowledges that there are marked differences between British and American children's book writers. "Great Britain has a longer, more fragmented history. I think that has had an effect on British writers. Also, we're on an island. We're isolated from the rest of the world. Perhaps that has caused British writers to have weirder imaginations," he says half-jokingly.
Someday Almond may go back to writing for adults, but for the moment he is happy to continue writing for children and feels that his writing is "now better than ever before." His newest book, Secret Heart, will be published in the U.S. this November. Presently, he is busy working on a screenplay for Skellig and is also writing another children's novel, which is due to be released in England next year. After living by the North Sea, in inner Manchester, in a Suffolk farmhouse and a "dilapidated Norfolk mansion," Almond has settled in Northumberland with his partner and four-year-old daughter. His description of their village, "25 miles from town, surrounded by hills and wild countryside," sounds enticingly familiar. Perhaps readers will be able to visit there in a future novel. —Lynda Brill Comerford
Jacqueline Wilson
"British things go in and out of fashion in the U.S, and these days it seems cool to be British," observes author Jacqueline Wilson. On the children's book front, that can be attributed to the success of such authors as J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, who are as broadly read in the U.S. as in the U.K. While Wilson is very popular in England, in the States she is not as well-known. Wilson is not discouraged, though, and neither is Delacorte Press, her U.S. publisher. "It sounds very greedy," Wilson says, "but I would love to be as popular in America as I am in the U.K."
Wilson, who lives in Kingston-on-Thames, not far from London, has written about 70 books for children, 10 of which have been released in the U.S. Her books have found their niche with a preteen and teenage, mostly female, audience. "I have been writing all of my adult life," she says. "I started when I was 17, writing for a juvenile magazine, and I wrote crime novels for adults. I have always been into writing realistically about the urban child. My first children's book was about a poor, inner-city child. I go for writing in the first person; that's the way I like to do it." Although Wilson doesn't cite any direct influences on her writing, she mentions The Bell Jar and The Catcher in the Rye—both written in first-person colloquial—as two of her favorite books.
"In the U.K., it's been quite magical in that I've come second to J.K. Rowling in the popularity charts," Wilson says. "Last year I was the fourth bestselling author in the U.K." In the U.S., on the other hand, she says she has discovered that she is mostly known among "some small pockets of American kids."
But Delacorte is hoping to change that. Wilson will embark on a five-city tour this fall to support the September release of Girls Out Late, the third book in her Girls series. "I had a tour in America last summer, and it was fantastic," Wilson recalls. She visited several cities throughout the country, ending up in Boston—"my favorite city of all," she says. "I go to Boston every year—I love it, love Cape Cod—so it was nice to be sent there to do some work." While in the States, the author says, she was struck by people's knowledge of children's books, and with "how they took children's books so seriously—they have a genuine love of the books."
And that love has extended into the current British literary wave. "Suddenly there's a taste [in America] for British children's fantasy," Wilson notes, "so writers like Philip Pullman are getting the attention they deserve. But it's a reciprocal thing: Lemony Snicket is big over here at the moment, and there isn't a young woman in her 20s who didn't read Judy Blume's books. I'm a big fan of some American writers as well—Karen Cushman, Virginia Euwer Wolff, Karen Hesse—and I'm doing my best to promote them [in England]."
What is it about Wilson's books that has captivated British audiences? "I try to keep [my writing] action-packed," she says, "and I try not to be too self-indulgent. I like detailed descriptions of what characters are reading and wearing, but that comes at the cost of action, so I might leave it out. In the first draft, I simply write for myself, pretending to be, say, a 10-year-old child. Initially it's too inhibiting to think about people seeing it."
But when she goes to type her words on the computer, Wilson says she becomes more aware that people will be reading what she has written. "And somewhat troublingly," she says with a laugh, "it's much easier for me to write as a child than as a middle-aged woman."
In the last three years or so, Wilson has been very prolific, completing three books each year. "I'm looking to slow down now," she says, "to two books a year, maybe even one." With a busy schedule of school visits and committee meetings, she manages to fit in writing wherever she can. "What I tell most people is that I write on trains," she says. "It's rare that I have a full day at home, and so I can write about 500 words on the way to London and another 500 words on the way home. I figure 1,000 words a day isn't bad."
Wilson's latest book, The Worry Website, has just been published in the U.K., and she has recently completed the fourth book in the Girls series, Girls in Tears, scheduled for U.S. publication in June 2003. —Jason Britton
Aidan Chambers
No one could accuse Aidan Chambers of rushing his thoughtful and sophisticated novels into print. His most recent work of fiction, Postcards from No Man's Land (Dutton, May), was nine years in the writing. "I never write a novel in less than five years," he says. "Because if I do it quickly, I'm forcing the story to become something I want it to be, not what it wants to be."
This unhurried, almost Zen-like approach has served the novelist well. Since he began his literary career, Chambers's books have garnered much critical acclaim. In 1999, Postcards won Britain's prestigious Carnegie Medal and, earlier this year, Chambers was awarded the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal for his body of work.
Postcards is told through two intertwining narratives. One is the romance of Geertrui, a Dutch girl, and Jacob, an English soldier in World War II. The other tale is set in the mid-1990s and tells of Jacob's grandson (also named Jacob) and his encounter with Geertrui and her family on his first solo trip abroad.
Postcards is the fifth in a projected six-book series that began with Chambers's novel Breaktime (first published in England in 1978, and brought to this country in 1979 by Charlotte Zolotow at Harper & Row). The term "series" is used loosely here: it's ideas and themes—not specific people and settings—that link these books together. "The series is like a family," says Chambers. "They have the same genetic base. But they have their own personalities, so you can know each one separately without having to know the rest."
Despite the enthusiastic critical reception each member of this "family" has received, it hasn't always been easy for the novels to fall into the hands of the literary-minded teenage readers for whom they were intended. Until recently, this has limited the size of the author's audience. "Small and dedicated" is how Chambers describes his readership, adding, "They tend to be thoughtful readers. They have to be! You can't just skate through my books."
Until recently, many of Chambers's ardent admirers were located not in his native England, but in the United States, Holland and Sweden—all countries with a strong tradition of teachers and librarians offering YA novels (as opposed to adult books) to teen readers.
"In England, if [teenagers] are studying literature, they read classics. They are not encouraged to read what we'd call youth novels," Chambers explains. "In Britain, I fall between the two schools, not being an early teenage writer and not being sold as an adult writer, so the readership that finds me the most interesting (16- to 22-year-olds) is a readership that has found me by accident."
Happily enough, this situation is changing. "Since the Carnegie happened," he says, "[my] readership has increased considerably. Teachers of young people felt that [Postcards] was something they could encourage them to read, because it was said to be a rather literary book."
Other forces at work in the world of children's publishing may serve to expand Chambers's audience as well. "Philip Pullman winning the Whitbread Prize indicates a shift in the perception of what are called 'crossover' books," Chambers says. "I think there has been a change that will be to my benefit. Because I fit into that strange 'no man's land,' so to speak."
Currently, Chambers is working on the sixth and final volume of his series, titled This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn. The project has been going on "three or four years," he says, "and so it has at least two or three more years [of writing]. It's the summation of all the books."
Once this project is completed, Chambers will take his leave of the world of adolescence and begin exploring a new emotional geography: "I will write in the consciousness of an old man. Because it's a new state. Because in the history of the world, we've never had the sort of older population that we have now. It's a whole new territory, and it needs mapping." It's hard to imagine a more able cartographer. —Kit Alderdice
Gillian Cross
With Holiday House publishing her tautly plotted novels in this country at a regular rate since the 1980s, Gillian Cross has enjoyed an established position on the American YA scene for quite a while. Still, she is hardly surprised at the attention her compatriots are receiving. "I think we're having a tremendous burst of writing in Britain. There are wonderful things going on. And I think the Harry Potter thing has encouraged people as well. Because it's raised the profile of children's books."
Citing Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden and Peter Dickinson's novel Tulku as early and continuing influences, Cross says, "I would describe the bulk of my work as stories full of incident, set in a variety of places and times, often with a kind of thriller plot. I like books where lots of things happen." This is certainly an apt description of Cross's most recent novel for young people, Phoning a Dead Man (Holiday, Apr.), a suspenseful tale set mostly in Siberia, involving an amnesiac on the run from the Russian Mafia.
In the United States, Cross is best known for her longer novels aimed at older readers, such as Wolf (winner of the Carnegie Medal in 1990) and The Great American Elephant Chase (winner of the Whitbread Children's Novel Award in 1992).
Cross's shorter, lighter books for younger readers are more widely circulated in England. It is there, too, that the author enjoys the glow of show business celebrity: her spookily hilarious "Demon Headmaster" books are the basis of a popular television series on the BBC.
Though her young adult novels can be enjoyed simply for their taut plotting, neatly drawn characters and exotic settings, there is a highly structured emotional underpinning available for the more thoughtful readers to ponder. Cross's characters never emerge from their exciting adventures unchanged.
And this is just as Cross would have it. "I do have a great belief in stories as being the way people work things out without knowing that they're working them out," she says. "Focusing on the stories themselves enables all sorts of other things to work themselves out. Like how you look at the world. I think there are things that you can't express any other way, other than in stories."
For Cross, inspiration generally springs from images and feelings, not a preconceived storyline. "What usually happens is that I start with a kind of picture; sometimes it's connected to a place. Dead Man came about because I wanted to write a story about a very cold place. But then I start out without knowing anything about the story. As I write it, I become aware of what the structure could be."
Indeed, it seems to be the pleasure of sheer storytelling that keeps Cross writing for younger readers. "If I wrote an adult novel, I'd want to write it as 'hard' as I can. It seems, in a way, that serious adult novels have sold their souls to irony. They always seem to be looking over their shoulders. And of course you can be more free when you write for children, there are so many ways to write. You don't get typecast, unless you elect to be typecast."
Keeping her readers riveted to the narrative is central to Cross's craft. "I think I assume an audience that will be easily bored. You know how when you're storytelling to an audience you can see in the flesh, you're very aware of keeping the audience's attention? I expect people to be very bored, so I really concentrate on keeping them interested, in keeping everything as tight as I can." So far, her audience here and abroad is responding with rapt attention. —Kit Alderdice
Melvin Burgess
"I was talking to a female friend about being 14 and 15," says Melvin Burgess of the inspiration for Lady: My Life as a Bitch (Holt, May). "Boys, when we'd talk to our friends, we'd be so rude and vulgar and crude. But she told me that when she was that age, she was really filthy as well! And I thought, Books for girls are always about romance, never about lust and desire. So Lady grew out of that idea."
Like Smack, the junkie novel that was Burgess's breakthrough book with American readers, Lady has fired up controversy on the other side of the Atlantic. It's an amoral portrait of an unrepentantly sexual teenage girl who gets turned into a dog—and eventually finds she likes it. "In England," notes Burgess, who lives in Manchester with his wife and stepson, "subjects like drugs and sex get strong press interest, especially when they involve kids and teenagers. But after the press dies down, I never get any letters complaining. I think most people understand that kids have access to this kind of material and that the books aren't in any way corrupting or dangerous. So it's not really a public issue, it's a press issue. Objections usually come from right-wing Christian pressure groups that have quite extreme views, but there aren't very many of those people, I think. The press digs them up." His reception here in the U.S. has been less reactionary, he notes happily, saying, "The debate has been much more about whether the books are any good, which is very encouraging."
At age 35, Burgess began life as a published author with The Cry of the Wolf (1989), which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. "Before that, I was out of work quite a lot. I worked on building sites, I was a bricklayer, I had a little business printing on silk. But I always liked writing," he says. "I was writing all my life. The Cry of the Wolf was the first one I managed to sell."
Simon & Schuster released several of the next six books in the U.S. (including Burning Issy and An Angel for May—"I don't think they did so well," Burgess admits). Now, though, the success of Smack (Holt)—which won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, under its British title of Junk—followed by Bloodtide (Tor) and Lady in quick succession, marks Burgess as a writer whose randy, angry characters have particular appeal to older readers. "My books for teenagers used to be more coy, more careful," he says. "They can be more up-front now."
Burgess sees himself not as a moralist but as a portraitist writing about youth cultures: drugs in Smack, gangs in Bloodtide (a gory revenge tale based on the first part of the Icelandic Volsunga Saga) and sex in Lady. "Smack was jumped on with great glee by the drug-education fraternity in England," he notes, "even though I didn't intend to be writing about a moral issue. It's just a story about the drug culture, but it is very often taken as a moral story because it's about heroin, and heroin is a baddy, and it has an unhappy ending. In Lady, of course, it's very difficult to find a distinct moral issue. That's one of the things that has made it controversial."
The author remains remarkably productive. Already out in Britain is Burgess's novelization of the movie Billy Elliot, and next up is a "knobby book" for boys. What is it about? "Knobs. Really!" Burgess gleefully insists ("knob" is British slang for penis). Following that, he'll write the sequel to Bloodtide, also based on the Volsunga Saga. "It's got these men trying to come to terms with how to behave. Great stuff. Dark, complicated women characters. Only my version is a little bit more bloody than Wagner's," he says with a laugh. —Emily Jenkins
