Anne Fine writes for both children and adults and her interest in politics and social issues comes across in many of her books.
Anne studied politics and history at University of Warwick. She briefly worked as a secondary school teacher and for the charity Oxfam before publishing her first children’s book, The Summer House Loon in the late 1970s.
Her work usually explores difficult themes with humour and has been widely praised, winning numerous awards including the Carnegie Medal, Whitbread Award (now known as the Costa Book Awards) and translated into over 40 languages. She has now written over 70 books spanning across all ages for children as well as adults. Her novel Madame Doubtfire was adapted into the award-winning film Mrs. Doubtfire, starring comedian Robin Williams. The film has also been turned into a successful musical play.
In 2003 Anne became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded an OBE for services to Children’s Literature.
Goals as Waterstones Children’s Laureate
As Children’s Laureate, Anne toured and campaigned to promote the importance of children’s reading, and to raise the profile of libraries.
She compiled three poetry anthologies (A Shame to Miss, volumes 1, 2 and 3) and launched the My Home Library scheme, encouraging children to build their own libraries at home – more than 100 artists and cartoonists provided over 150 original bookplate designs for this.
This project branched out to a dedicated My Home Library scheme with charity ClearVision, providing every braille-reading child who regularly uses ClearVision a selection of books and brailled name labels for them to put inside.
Anne Fine does not shy away from the fact that separation and divorce are painful, but she does have an uplifting message about the power of honesty and compromise.
When Russian Ivan arrives at Boris’s school, Boris is assigned as his translator. But while Boris is a mild-mannered, peace-loving child, Ivan is quite the opposite.
Ben doesn’t want to sit next to Alice in class – she’s scary. But her forthright opinions might just be helpful to him… An accessible, dyslexia-friendly story told with humour and a light touch.
To celebrate 20 years of the Waterstones Children’s Laureates in 2019, we asked Anne Fine to tell us about her memories of holding the post in 2001–2003.
