News
 I was interviewed recently by Amanda Craig and her article appeared in The Times newspaper on 26 July.
The photographer for the article was Retts Wood and this is one of the pictures she took of me in Regent's Park.
The official Stravaganza website, hosted by Bloomsbury, has been updated. You can read an exclusive new story there and lots more information about the books and cities.
There's now a Dutch Stravaganza site, created by one of my readers.  City of Secrets, the fourth book in the Stravaganza series, was published in the UK on July 7. The other three books have been rejacketed to match the new look for the series.
Buy from Amazon (pbk)
I now have my own section on chronicles-network.com. The site should be of interest to all fantasy and science fiction fans but also covers historical fiction and all types of YA novels
Amazing Grace was given The Break-a-leg Award for excellence in Children's
Literature About Theater, Acting, Singing and/or Dancing by students
at Penn State University.
The Falconer's Knot was nominated for the Malice Domestic
Agatha Award for the best novel in the children's/young adult
category.
The Falconer's Knot is one of 40 books on USBBY's list of Outstanding International Books for 2008. USBBY is the United States Board on Books for Young People - you can find out more about the list in this article.
I will be one of this year's judges for this year's Guardian Children's Book Prize.
I have been invited by the Italian children's literature review journal Liber, to join Jack Zipes (USA), Dieter Richter (Germany), Janine Despinette (France) and Carla Poesio and others from Italy on an international committee to discuss current children's books. Nikki Gamble recently interviewed me about Amazing Grace and my other books about Grace. You can read the interview on the Write Away website.
I attended the International Reading
Association's Congress in Atlanta, Georgia from 4-8 May 2008.
The Stravaganza fan forum has now had more than 171,000 hits. Because of an invasion of spam, many members of the forum are
switching to join sffchronicles.co.uk where I have my own
author page. It should be of interest to all fantasy and science
fiction fans but also covers historical fiction and all types of YA
novels.
In November, I went to a party given by one of my publishers, Frances Lincoln, to celebrate their 30th birthday. The managing director, John Nicoll, particularly mentioned Amazing Grace in his speech as it's the only one of their books to sell a million copies.
 The paperback of The Falconer's Knot will be available in the UK next April with a brand new cover.
The publication date for City of Secrets in the UK has changed to July 2008.
I wrote an articles about princesses and "pink books" for the Guardian. You can read it here.
 Mary with a winning princess
at Brecknock School
Princess Grace was published on October 4th in the UK and will be published in January 2008 in the US. I read it to some children at Brecknock School in London in June and gave prizes for the best Prince and Princess costumes.
Buy from Amazon.co.uk.
There will be a new Grace doll in African costume from Merrymakers in 2008.
Stravaganza: Cité des Masques (the French translation of City of Masks) has won the Junior Roman (junior novel) category of the French prize, Livrentête, orgainised by librarians and voted on by young readers.
 The Falconer's Knot was on the
shortlist for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.
I have finished writing City of Secrets! It is the fourth book in the Stravaganza series and the beginning of a new trilogy. It is due to be published in the UK next April and in the US in July.
I was at the Bologna Book Fair, meeting foreign
publishers, from 23rd to 26th April.
The Falconer's Knot was published on 2nd April. You can find out more about it here.
I
talked about historical fiction with Caroline Lawrence on the radio programme, Open Book,
in March.
There is going to be a Turkish edition of Stravaganza. The series is now available in 27 different languages.
I have finished writing the new Grace picture book, Princess Grace, and it is currently being illustrated by Cornelius van Wright and Ying-Hwa
Hu (the artists for An Angel Just Like Me). The book will be published at
the beginning of October this year.
Amazing Grace has been chosen as one of three books for the "Small
Island Read" initiative. There was a mass read-in
in four British cities - Glasgow, Bristol, Liverpool and Hull - of
Andrea Levy's Small Island. Children will read Amazing Grace and
Benjamin Zephaniah's Refugee Boy. The promotion was part of the 200th
anniversary of the end of slavery, in 2007. I visited
Glasgow on January 11th and will be in Bristol later in the year.
Exciting news! Bloomsbury have just commissioned two more Stravaganza titles. The first one will come out in the UK, as a paperback original, in spring 2008. It will be set in Padavia (the Talian equivalent of Padua) where Luciano will be studying at university. For more information, please see the FAQs page.
On 11th November 2006, I was in conversation with Jamila Gavin in Roehampton at the IBBY day school: Time Everlasting: Representations of Past, Present and Future in Children's Literature.
I appeared at the Litteralund Festival in Lund,
Sweden, on 8th and 9th September 2006.
The paperback
of City of Flowers was
published in March and is available from all good bookshops,
including Amazon.co.uk.
In response
to questions from readers, I've added two new pages to the site.
One lists my favourite fantasy books and
the other has advice for writers.
Bloomsbury have
produced a Stravaganza leaflet and bookmark. If you would like
one, please email childrensmarketing bloomsbury.com
The French edition
of City of Masks is now out, and so
are the German audio CDs of City of Masks and
City of Stars.
www.fanfiction.net
now has a Stravaganza thread. Please do read it and write some
of your own.
I was in conversation
with Francesco d'Adamo at the Italian Cultural Institute in London
on 10th October at 6.30pm. We discussed Stravaganza
and D'Adamo's Iqbal, which is available
in English, as part of the wider Children's Book Festival on Translation.
Stravaganza: City of Masks was one of the "Top
ten books for fans of
Harry Potter" in the Waterstone's Harry Potter Report.
Stravaganza:
City of Flowers was number 12 in the Bookseller's
15 best-selling children's books in hardback
Amazing
Grace has just gone into its 38th American edition

The four dual language versions of Amazing Grace
were launched at the Newham bookshop in July 2006.
I have just
done two visits to the Edinburgh festival, one for Stravaganza
on 22nd August and one for the Grace books on 30th August
Big domestic
news! I have three new Burmese cats : Lonza, Lila and Lorenzo.
They are a chocolate girl, lilac tortie girl and a blue boy.
 
On 14th July,
I attended the Lowdham Festival near Nottingham, as part of a
Scattered Authors promotion, and did two sessions, one on
Grace and one on Stravaganza.
On Saturday
25th June, I signed books at the American Library Association
conference in Chicago.
I gave two readings
at the ALOUD festival at the Harbourfront in Toronto on Friday
24th June, one for Stravaganza: City of Flowers
and the other for the Amazing
Grace series
I visited the
Bologna Book Fair 2005 to meet my foreign
publishers. The Italian ones were charming, the German one wanted
to publish TWELVE Stravaganza novels
and the Icelandic and Finnish ones, who have now become friends,
were a pleasure to meet again. I spent a lot of time with the
people from Frances Lincoln, met people from Barrington Stoke
and Barefoot and bumped into a journalist friend who was apparently
reading City
of Flowers in her hotel room at night - I hope
this leads to a good review!
On the weekend
of 2nd/3rd April, I visited the Federation of Children's Book
Groups conference in St. Alban's where I appeared on a fantasy
panel with Wendy Cooling on the Saturday morning.
Sadly, I have
lost my last cat, the Burmese Kichri, whose picture is on the
'about me' pages. She had to be put down on Valentine's Day, aged
eighteen and a half. She will be followed, not replaced, by two
Burmese kittens in the summer or autumn of this year.
City of Flowers is now
available. You can read an
extract on the
Stravaganza website.
Bravo,
Grace! is now available in the UK. It being distributed
in the US by Publishers Group West.

Book signing at Harrods
On 7th March, publication
day, I signed copies of City of Flowers
and Bravo, Grace! in Harrods.
There's a new
Stravaganza short story for you to read on the
Stravaganza website.
WH Smith's featured
City of Masks in their Prize-winners
Promo which ran from 15th September until 19th October.
I visited the
Icelandic Children’s Book Festival in Reyjavik at the end
of September.
I
met librarians and children at the Brooklyn Central Library during
my visit to New York in August, 2004.
Lines
in the Sand was shortlisted for the Centre for Language
in Primary Education (CLPE) Poetry ward.
City
of Stars was shortlisted for the WH Smith Teen Choice
Award 2004.
I spent all
of October 2003 in Florence, making a start on writing City
of Flowers, which is set in that city - at least
in a parallel world version of it. You can read my
Florentine diary here.
Laura Bush,
wife of the American president, chose my picture book Amazing
Grace as one of her five favourite children's books.
She described it as a story about how you can be whatever you
want to be. The other books were
Little Women by Louisa Mae Alcott, Little House on
the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frog and Toad
by Arnold Lobel and Dr Seuss’s Hop on Pop.
LAURA BUSH’S choice of Mary Hoffmann’s
Amazing Grace as one of her favourite, must-read children’s
books may seem like ducking out from naming JK Rowling or
Philip Pullman, both anathema to the fundamentalist Christian
lobby.
In fact, it is an inspired
one. Americans have always taken picture-books seriously
as an art form, thanks to the native genius of Maurice Sendak
and Ludwig Bemelmans, but Amazing Grace is exactly the kind
of book to appeal to the can-do American attitude..........
(read rest of article)
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Amanda Craig, The Times
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