Friday 6 March 2009

World Book Day: what did you do?

It was World Book Day this week, so we asked a few top authors to tell us what they got up to on the day...

My World Book Day began with a morning session in Holyrood Secondary, Glasgow - their first author visit in years. I spoke to some lovely S2s. The afternoon was spent in Knightswood Primary School, Glasgow on the invitation of Eileen from Lost in Fiction Bookshop, Byres Rd, Glasgow. The entire school was celebrating World Book Day on a massive scale, with pupils and all the teachers in fancy dress, free coffee from Starbucks, competitions, and a head teacher disguised as Captain Hook. The enthusiasm for books and reading was as delicious as the cup cakes on sale. I spoke to all the P6 and P7 pupils about about my favourite book and told them how my snake escaped. It was a BRAW WBD indeed!


Annemarie Allan
To Musselburgh Burgh Primary to talk to two classes about Breaker, my new book. The children were delighted to hear about a story that takes place in North Berwick, so close to where they live. Not only are writers real people, but they write about real places. World Book day is not only international – it is local too! Then a short question and answer session with another class about my previous book, Hox. What they most particularly wanted to know was when I was going to write the sequel, so we spent an interesting ten minutes talking about that. I left them with the suggestion that they might like to write the sequel themselves and I am looking forward immensely to finding out what happened to my characters after the last page of the book.

K. M. Grant
On World Book Day, I will be in Rome, presenting a book to the Vatican. Not one of mine! In 1550, a beautiful book was created for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, grandson of Pope Paul III. Popes were quite naughty in those days, hence the grandchildren. The book was nine years in the making and illuminated with jewel-like pictures by a brilliant artist called Giulio Clovio. Eventually the book became known as the Towneley Lectionary, and before I married, I was a Towneley. A stunning new facsimile (a facsimile is an exact copy) edition has been produced and the publishers thought it would be nice if my father attended the Vatican presentation. He asked if I could go too. It is my most unusual World Book Day visit to date. Not sure if I'll see the present pope, but am hoping at least to catch a glimpse of his cat...

John and Sandra from Metaphrog
On World Book Day, we were hard at work on our graphic novel in progess, Louis - Night Salad, scripting, pencilling and painting, as well as cleaning up some pages of line art for a short story. Finally, we prepared material for conducting a visual storytelling and comic workshop at Perth High School the following day.


So that's a little bit about what some of our writerly friends got up to. Now we want to know what you did! Tell us about your World Book Day by adding a comment or drop us an email: teen@scottishbooktrust.com.

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