Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

A few years ago when I was living in upstate New York I joined Literacy Volunteers of America and began teaching basic reading, writing and ...

Like the smell of woodsmoke – which always takes me back to a narrow sun-striped Majorcan street lined with tall houses, silent in the after...

The traditional Old Irish voyage tales known as immrama mostly tell of voyages towards the west, the traditional (European) direction fo...

The Irish hero Bran’s Mystical Voyage begins when, after being lulled to sleep by the magical music of a silver branch with white app...

This will be the first of two posts about other worlds in children’s and YA fiction – about fantasy worlds; the sort of magical countries m...

I once read, I think in an essay by C.S. Lewis – that to have weird or unusual protagonists in a fantasy world was gilding the lily. Simply...

My younger daughter tells me she looks for two things in a book: a mischievous, iconoclastic hero or heroine – and descriptions of wonder...

It's snowing! I know this may be unexciting news for anyone much north of Oxford, but although it's been freezing here since Chris...

Why write for children? Each time I’m asked this, I probably come up with a different answer, and sometimes I’m tempted to be a little sha...