More Brighton Children's Book Festival coverage

The fantastic Candy Gourlay of Notes from the Slush Pile has blogged many excellent photos from the festival. Read all about it here.

Candy gave a very entertaining talk about using the internet to promote yourself as an author/illustrator. It was abbreviated, and I would definitely think about bringing her back for the whole session. If this is something you are thinking about, she's got a really in-depth and useful flyer she's put together on her blog. Look in the right-hand panel where it says 'Freebie Alert!'

I still haven't written about the people who spoke after the workshops. Or the fabulous 'decorating dragon cakes' session run by Momma Cherri of Gordon Ramsey fame. We have to get pictures of her since the children were very proud of their creations. We had an impressive performance from Feather Boy, the musical, which you can see a bit of through the ITV link listed below.

Dakota Blue Richards was charming and shy, and very generous in answering questions from the audience. She spoke about being in The Golden Compass film, what it was like to act against nothing/no one since so much was done with CGI, and gave some taster information about the film version of The Little White Horse which she stars in and is coming out in August. You can see a very brief bit of her talk in the ITV clip below as well.

David Almond was, as always, totally inspiring. He speaks in such a thoughtful and soft way, making you feel like you could be a writer too. There's a lovely quote in the ITV clip where he talk about how children are, in fact, writers, and the importance of festivals like this one. 

We had a few technical difficulties getting the sound up to speed, but then we got to see the TV adaptation of David Almond's Clay. Peter Tabern wrote the screen play and produced it. This is a darker story that explores children, madness and morality, with many stellar performances, including one by Imelda Staunton (if I'm spelling that right) of Vera Drake fame.

Must finish - but I did get the real pleasure of going for dinner with my husband (a charming man, he), Nicky Singer, David Almond, his partner Sara Jane and their daughter Freya, and Peter Tabern. Who could have asked for more interesting company. I was at the end of the table with Peter and Freya, and we discussed which books would be good to consider for TV adaptation. I suggested A Swift Pure Cry by Siobhan Dowd, though that would be another dark one. But I think it's one of the most powerfully-written children's books that I've read in a very long time.

OK, enough for now. I'll try to got more down later...

Other coverage of the festival

We've had some great coverage for the festival, and I wanted to give people links if they were interested.

ITV Local TV had a great feature, with interviews and clips from the festival. If you missed it and want to get a flavor of what happened, take a look here. 

Daniel Hahn, co-editor of The Ultimate Book Guides books, wrote a nice, in-depth blog entry on the festival. Like me, he's a big fan of David Almond's work, and you'll see what he thought of other speakers as well.

I'll try to write more about what happened, but wanted to get these links up right away.

Want to know what happened at the Brighton Children's Book Festival?

Well, this'll be my first crack at giving a report. But we took lots of photos and video which should be posted on the website at some point, so I'll be sure to post when that happens.

Where do I start? There was so much going on, and it was my dream programme. We got to hear from Kitty Taylor and David Mackintosh about how things work behind the scenes in the Charlie and Lola TV show. They showed some short clips, lots of images, and finished off with a full episode from CBeebies. Did you know that they digitally add a drop shadow effect to make the show capture some of the feeling from the books?

Nicky Singer talked about some of her book adaptations, including Feather Boy for TV, done by Peter Tabern (pronounced Tah-bern, as we all later learned) who spoke later in the day. Nicky told about meeting Peter with some trepidation, but finding he really 'got' her book and feeling it was safe in his hands. It struck me that this was high praise indeed. Her latest book, which she has only just finished writing, is being adapted by Glyndbourne as an opera (it's a version of King Arthur set in contemporary gangland) - so that will be something to look out for.

Then we broke for parallel workshops, which all seemed to be fairly full of enthusiastic people, young and old. Marcia Williams offered one on creating comics, which she is well-suited for as she has done many a comic book adaptation from a classic text. (She also did the MA at Roehampton University which is what brought me over to England, and where I now work. There was a nice little Roehampton contingent there, as it happened.) Lisa Boggis Boyce (another Roehampton-ite) offered a making pop-ups workshop, and I got to see some of the fantastic creations when I popped in for a peep.

Cassy is waking, so I'll have to come back later with more. And I'm having problem uploading images, so I'm afraid this looks rather sparse...

Latest US Publishing Trends?

I know I haven't been posting much, but...

I've been asked by Oxford Brookes University to be on a panel discussion at the upcoming London Book Fair (I'm speaking on Tuesday, 15th April). They asked me to talk about recent children's publishing trends in the US. Since I'm now living in the UK, I don't feel that my knowledge is as up-to-date as it could be. So....

I was wondering if people could post their thoughts on this topic. What would you say are the latest publishing trends in the US? I notice that several publishers are starting-up eco-friendly publishing lines, so perhaps that's something.

Any ideas or thoughts would be much appreciated!