Wesley College Library

Book Week Author visit: Jenny Valentine

On Tuesday 21 October Jenny Valentine spoke to Form II. Jenny Valentine lives in Hay-on-Wye with her husband and children and runs their shop three days a week. The rest of the time she devotes to writing. She published her first novel, Finding Violet Park, in 2007 and it won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. Broken Soup followed in 2008 and she told Form II that her third novel, The Ant Colony, which she has just finished will be published in March 2009.

She finds openings easy and explained how and where she gets her ideas. Her first novel is told from a fifteen-year-old boy’s perspective, her second has a female narrator and she has already been translated into Italian, German and Dutch as well as being published in America where Finding Violet Park was re-titled Me, the Missing and the Dead. Valentine read from her first two novels and this was followed by a question and answer session.

Author visit: Kate Thompson

On Thursday, 16 October,  Form I and Preps met Kate Thompson, author of many highly-acclaimed novels and winner of the Whitbread, Guardian, Bisto [four times] Awards and she has also won the Dublin Airport Authority Book of the Year Award. Living in Ireland since 1981 and daughter of the distinguished social historian E.P. Thompson, Kate Thompson’s work combines the realistic and the supernatural. All of Form I were familiar with Thompson’s work Creature of the Night [which had as its working title The Small Woman] which they read in class and it proved a very popular choice. They hung on her every word and they had many, many questions. She told Form I and Preps that she wrote in longhand, could write a first draft in three weeks but a novel really took a year to complete. She named Jan Mark’s The Eclipse of the Century one of the best books for teenagers ever and she also praised Geraldine McCaughrean’s work. Creature of the Night is being published in America and she showed us the American cover. She is now working on a novel about climate change.

Book Week Author visit: Keith Gray

On Tuesday 14 October the Edinburgh-based, English writer Keith Gray brightened up a rainy afternoon when he spoke to Form III about himself and his work. He began with a commentary on some of  the eighteen different instructions that came with a ladder he had recently bought and then produced a rock from the shores of Loch Ness and a cigar (he HATES smoking) and told two fascinating and engaging stories about both. Then having had the audience in the palm of his hand he announced that one of those stories was a lie. He didn’t read much as a boy but loved comics and his favourite book is The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall: ‘It ‘s not the best book that I’ve ever read but when I was thirteen a really cool guy in school, a year above me, was reading it so I read it too and it won me over to the power of storytelling.’

He spoke about his six novels, showed pupils different editions of his work including a Japanese version of Creepers and also produced the manuscript of his next novel: he writes in pencil on the right hand side of the page and on the left makes notes and observations as he goes. He was a very entertaining speaker and Jack Perdue presented Keith Gray with a gift and thanked him for coming to Wesley.