Royal Mail Award Nominees - Older Readers

This month’s interview features the authors and illustrators who are nominated for the 2008 Royal Mail Awards talking about their shortlisted books as well as discussing other aspects of their writing, drawing, career, childhood and their reading. Here you can read about the Older Readers Category or if you want to read about the Early Years or the Younger Readers category click on the links.
You can find out more about each author and illustrator by clicking on their name or by clicking on the book title.

J A Henderson


Where did the idea for Bunker 10 come from?
I was working as an Easter Bunny in Texas, which required me to wear a giant pink rabbit suit and not talk all day.  After two weeks of intense heat, being tortured by children I began to make up the most twisted and nasty story I could think of to stop myself going insane.  Or maybe I had gone insane by that time.  Anyway, the result was Bunker 10.  Lots of children die in it.
How did you feel when you found out that you had been shortlisted for the Royal Mail Awards?
Over the moon.  There are tribes in New Guinea who don't know yet, but I emailed everyone else.
If you could have 3 people (alive or dead) round for dinner, who would it be and what would you cook them?
Hitler, Jesus and Elvis.  I wouldn't have to cook anything because they're all dead, but it would make a great photograph. 

James Jauncey


The young boy in the book, Ninian, has Fragile X Syndrome can you tell us about it?
It's a genetic disorder like autism, though not quite the same. For example, Fragile X kids can be very uncomfortable with people they don't know; they like doing things over and over again, watching the same cartoon for instance; and they can't really think in straight lines, so they wouldn't figure out that because it's raining they need to wear a raincoat. They can have terrible tantrums, but they can also be very, very loving. I based Ninian on a real boy I know. You can read more about his role in the story, and an article about him and his mother, on my website at www.jamesjauncey.com/story  If you want to know more about the condition you can also visit the Fragile X Society's website at www.fragilex.org.uk
There are some fantastic scenes in the book, which is your favourite?
There's a lot about music in the book and I loved writing the scene in the pub in Aviemore when John, the main character, jumps up on stage, picks up a fiddle and joins in with the band in order to avoid detection by the soldiers who are pursuing him. I also enjoyed describing the refugee camp in Bught Park in Inverness, which eventually gets flooded by the River Ness. I like to put my imaginary story in actual places so that the description becomes very real. But I also love writing the sequences where dramatic things happen: the killing of the lynx, John's little brother's death, Ninian getting lost in the snowy wood, the torture scene in the farmhouse kitchen - all of which make it sound as if the book's terribly gruesome, but it's not really! They're just the things I imagined might happen in a war, and there are plenty of tender moments too.
Could you give us some tips for young people interested in becoming writers?
Read, read, read. The older I get the more I realise how much I learnt about good writing simply through the books I read when I was a kid. If you're naturally interested in stories and language, it just goes in like the air we breathe, and it's hard to imagine a more wonderful way to learn than by reading great stories. But one caveat - train yourself to be selective. If you think it's rubbish, if it's a badly told story, or the style annoys you, or the characters don't ring true, ditch it straight away. Don't let anyone make you read a bad book to the end. Life's too short!

Elizabeth Laird


How did you research Crusade?
I've spent a great deal of time in the Middle East, and have visited many castles, old cities, souks, mosques and even churches dating from nine hundred years ago, when Crusade is set. It was easy for me to visualise the settings for my novel, and to have some inkling of the way people of the Middle East might have thought and felt in those days. In fact, it was rather harder to imagine the mind-set of English people in the twelfth century, whose ignorance and superstition would shock us today.
Of course, I did all the usual things – read dozens of books, consulted ancient tomes on heraldry, horses, armour, dogs, castles, ships and so on. The internet was not particularly useful, as so many sites are unreliable. My greatest help was my old friend Carol Hillenbrand, who is Professor of Arabic at  Edinburgh University and who has written extensively about the Crusades.
Which of the characters do you most like?
Although of course I became very involved in my two main characters, Adam and Selim, I developed a very soft spot for Dr Musa, and also, I'm afraid, for the villain Jacques. He's just so impossibly cheeky! Are there any characters I don't like?
The pig boy at Fortis castle is perhaps the most loathsome character I've ever created.
What was the first book you had published?
My first published book was a reader in simplified English for people learning to speak our language. It was called Anna and the Fighter, and it was based on an incident on a train in India, when I fell asleep, went hundreds of miles beyond my destination, and only woke up when the train reached the sea.