Find out what's new on our websites, where we've been, what's on our minds and the things we're doing.
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Laura Dockrill's Favourite Author: Patrick Hamilton
Posted Monday September 28th 2009
by Laura DockrillLaura Dockrill, aka Dockers MC, is one of literature's newest and brightest hopes, with her rudeboy onstage poetry persona and delicate funny and touching books like Ugly Shy Girl. Having seen her step offstage, a banshee of foul-mouthed hilarity, we thought we'd simply ask her who her favourite author was. And what a good choice, the down and outer himself, Patrick Hamilton. Dockrill was named one of The Times' 2008 literary ones to watch and her book Ugly Shy Girl, with its winning combination of diary-like confessional and diagrams and illustrations is a beautiful tale of teenage misfittery.
My dad is good for two things- shepherds pie and books, he has always been my guinea pig in the universe of the literary world, in fact come to think of it I have never had a bad recommendation from him. I met Patrick Hamilton’s words when I was 19 years old; my dad plonked this gigantic novel, Crash, onto the pub table. I was like, 'really?' but was completely captivated on the bus home and that book, four years later, is still my favourite book of all time. Not only is Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky beautifully written, technically flawless-…
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At the Child Health Conference, London
Posted Friday September 25th 2009
by Elaine BielbyI attended the Child Health Conference, 'Implementing Healthy Lives, Brighter Futures', in Central London on 17 September 2009. The delegates were a mix of commissioners, health visitor lead officers, speech and language therapists and people from third sector organisations. The conference brought delegates up to date with Government priorities and progress on the Child Health Strategy, which was published in February 2009.
Heather Gwynne, Director, Chief Nursing Office Directorate, Department of Health, stressed the critical importance of a healthy childhood from the very start, as well as the development of brain formation, attachment and action on child health and wellbeing. The mental health strategy ‘New Horizons’ will help inform adolescent mental health services. This will require innovation in partnership working especially with the third sector.
The Government's current ‘action on health visiting’ hopes to transform the workforce by looking at direct entry training programmes to address the shortfall in the number of health visitors.
The two-year Transforming Community Services programme is a wider strategy which will be prioritising the very best start in life for maternity and early years; emotional resilience and mental health; young people’s health; and disabled children.
Judith Smyth, Commissioning Support Programme, DCSF, put a question to…
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Letting go of Patrick
Posted Thursday September 17th 2009
by James SmithAll good things come to an end, and Patrick Ness’s tenure as Booktrust’s first-ever online writer in residence is no exception.
It’s been an exciting six months: Patrick’s written 20 blog posts, ten sets of writers’ tips and an exclusive short story about how Viola came to crashland on Todd’s planet (if you’re a fan of The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer – and why wouldn’t you be? – you’ll realise what a coup this was). ‘The New World’ has been viewed more than 1,500 times since the end of June.
Patrick’s also been interviewed by a class of knowledgeable and enquiring teenagers, and a teacher has written a lesson plan for The Knife of Never Letting Go.
Somehow during all of this, he found time to finish the third book in the Chaos Walking series, which we were told in 3 August’s blog entry is to be called Monsters of Men. Another exclusive!
And (can there really be an ‘and’?) he ran the London marathon, bloodying his leg in the process, but getting himself patched up and carrying on regardless.
Throughout Patrick’s virtual residency we have been given a fascinating insight into the…
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Poetry and Young People project
Posted Tuesday September 15th 2009
by Carol DixonIt’s been just over a month since I joined Booktrust as Project Manager for a new Poetry and Young People initiative funded by Arts Council England.
The job is going really well and, as part of my initial induction, I’ve met lots of key people from the world of poetry and the wider literary arts – each with some truly amazing stories to tell about the transformative impact of poetry on young lives.
One of the most exciting aspects of the role to-date has been meeting groups of young people who enjoy writing and performing their own poetry. For example, earlier this month I met a group called ‘Yourlabel’ – an after-school performance poetry club for young Londoners, aged 13-16 years, set up by Apples and Snakes.
On the day of my visit to their performance space at Chat’s Palace Arts Centre (Hackney, London) eight group members were crafting a series of alliterative pieces with the US-born writer, historian, actor and Hip Hop lyricist Kenny Baracka. Each person chose their own theme and then structured poems using six enquiry questions: Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?
Through word-play and humour Kenny took the young people on a…
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Interview with Speech Debelle
Posted Wednesday September 9th 2009
by Nikesh ShuklaMadame Jojo's, Soho, London- March 2009
Speech Debelle is onstage rapping her heart out, an acoustic guitarist creating beautiful grooves around her. Everyone in the room's heart is breaking. My mind is elsewhere: I'm focused on the table piled with books next to her, wondering what they're there for. She seems to gesture to them a lot. In the words of Bill Hicks, 'Ladies and gentlemen, looks like we got ourselves a reader.'
So Speech Debelle, poet and rapper and winner of 2009's Mercury Music Prize for her album, Speech Therapy a collection of sombre, jazzy and starkly honest narrative-based songs all telling stories of love and life and heartbreak and triumph over adversity, is a reader? I had to know more. A conversation with her bemused record company head who agreed to let me interview her about books later, we were sat in Clapham Junction talking about words and pages and stories.
Right, Speech, at your album launch party, I noticed you had a table of books with you on stage. How come?
The layout of the stage seemed like a therapy session, although I didn’t go to therapy. The music we were performing was therapy to me,…
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In praise of ... Hanif Kureishi
Posted Tuesday September 8th 2009
by Nikesh ShuklaBookstart website editor Nikesh Shukla loves The Buddha of Suburbia.
My first experience of Hanif Kureishi wasn’t to do with books at all. Neither was my most experience of him, but more on that later. The first time I heard about Hanif Kureishi was when The Buddha of Suburbia was first televised, starring a young Naveen Andrews and featuring new songs by David Bowie. I didn’t know much about the 70s or alternative lifestyles being a fairly sheltered Gujarati boy from the suburbs. But it had Indians in it and that was enough for me to take an interest. The Indians in question weren’t pandering to any racist stereotypes, weren’t there for multicultural set dressing or weren’t the butt of the joke. In The Buddha of Suburbia they were the protagonists. They were the chutney. I was 13, though, and my mum felt that the content of the programme was a little too adult for me so I wasn’t able to watch it.
She couldn’t stop me reading it though.
Being a resourceful kid without too much money and a huge reading habit, I used to buy books from charity shops and save the big bucks for weekly comics. A…
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Roald Dahl Funny Prize 09
Posted Tuesday September 8th 2009
by Rebecca WilkieThe funny books we read as children are often the ones we remember best and perhaps that’s why Roald Dahl’s books have endured. I can remember shaking with laughter as a child when I read and re-read Dahl’s account of the great mouse plot in Boy and his Red Riding Hood from Revolting Rhymes, who ‘whips a pistol from her knickers’ to calmly defend herself against the wolf, still raises a smile today!
The shortlists for this year’s Roald Dahl Funny Prize feature books which continue the Dahlian tradition of anarchic humour. Chosen by a panel of judges chaired by poet and former Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen (whose own collection, Quick Let’s Get Out of Here, used to reduce my class at junior school to bouts of near hysterical giggles) and including comedian Bill Bailey, authors Mini Grey and Louise Rennison and last year’s winner Andy Stanton, the books on the 2009 shortlists are sure to amuse even the most stony-faced reader.
Animals abound in the funniest book for children aged six and under category; there’s the story of a space-bound elephant in the pop-up Elephant Joe is a Spaceman! by David Wojtowycz and a crocodile who loves…
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In praise of ... Richard Ford
Posted Wednesday September 2nd 2009
by James SmithIn the first of an occasional series about authors we admire, Booktrust website editor James Smith tries to explain why he loves Richard Ford's books so much.
How did I first stumble across Richard Ford? It’s hard to remember, but I think I plucked a copy of Wildlife – minus its back cover – out of the ‘damaged’ box of the bookshop I was working in at the time. It had a horrible jacket design, but once I’d got past this I was drawn in by Ford’s visceral prose style – what later became known, thanks to Granta magazine, as ‘dirty realism’, a catch-all phrase that encompassed a lot of American writing at the time.
Later, I tried another, The Ultimate Good Luck: more gritty grittiness. And then. Then I read something extraordinary, and extraordinarily different, like nothing I’d read before; a novel called The Sportswriter, the first of what eventually became a trilogy of books about a New Jersey man by the name of Frank Bascombe.
Here was the life of an ‘ordinary’ suburban man, struggling with work, bereavement and the collapse of his marriage, told in the most beautiful, tragic and yet unpatronising way. For me, the heartbreaking…
