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 childrensmarketingbloomsbury.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

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.

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