Non-fiction
Introduction
Books for children
Books for adults
Introduction
I wrote sixteen Animals in the Wild for
my friend Martin Pick, who was running Belitha Books at the time.
I used
to do them in batches of four and it was very exciting working
with a picture researcher. Stella used to go off to picture libraries – which
are just like book libraries, except that transparencies are smaller
than books - and come back with slides of animals, which we would
look at on a light box.
I would choose my favourite pictures and arrange them in order
in plastic pockets before writing a word. We always began with
a picture of a young animal and tried to end with one of the
animal relating to a human.
But however much research I did, Stella would always come back
with something unexpected and wonderful – like the lion cub
biting his father on the bum in Lion or the tigress
running through a field of yellow flowers in Tiger.
You can probably guess how much I enjoyed writing the ones about
members of the cat family! But I also love wolves and polar bears
and my children were particularly excited when I was working on
pandas and elephants and zebras.
Books for children
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Amazing Mammals Kit (ed)