Author Visits: St John's Walham Green

I'd like to say a big thank you to Emma Richards and everyone I met at St John's Walham Green CE Primary School for the great welcome they gave me when I visited them this week!

I really enjoyed talking to Years 6, 5, 4 & 3 about reading and books.  I was delighted to learn that Year 6 & Year 5 had already read Varjak Paw in when they were in Year 4, and the current Year 4s had done some amazing work with my book.  I was so impressed, I decided to share some of it on my blog!

Here's a brilliant map of the book that one of the students created (above) – and some very accurate gang rules for Varjak's gang and Sally Bones's gang (below)!

It was a pleasure to answer questions and to sign books for everyone at the end of the day.  We didn't quite have enough time for all the questions, so if anyone from St John's has any more questions they'd like to ask, or would like to say anything about the visit or my books, just leave me a comment below!

Author Visits: Fortismere School

I'd like to say a very big thank you to brilliant librarian Gillian Ward and to everyone at Fortismere School for the fantastic welcome they gave me when I returned to visit them again last week!

I was Patron Of Reading at Fortismere for two years, from 2015-2017 – you can read all my blogs about everything we did here!  So it was a total pleasure to come back and meet the new Year 7s, and to talk to them about writing and books.  And then in the evening, I had the honour of meeting this year's Reading Champions.

Reading Champions involves young readers recommending their favourite books to each other in presentations.  This year, the finalists were championing a wonderful range of books: Pig Heart Boy by Malorie Blackman, Railhead by Philip Reeve, Wonder by RJ Palacio, The Enemy by Charlie Higson, Itch by Simon Mayo, Swallows And Amazons by Arthur Ransome, The Last Wild by Piers Torday, Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak – and, amazingly, Phoenix by me!

I was knocked out by these presentations, and by their passion for books and reading.  And I was especially delighted when Zaki's fantastic presentation on Phoenix was voted the winner!  So congratulations to Zaki – and thanks to everyone who made this such a memorable evening!