Wednesday, November 09, 2005


So much has been going on since I last found time for blogging: At the end of September we awarded the Booktrust Early Years Awards at BAFTA, won by Poppy Cat's Farm by Lara Jones (Campbell Books), The Very Dizzy Dinosaur by Jack Tickle (Little Tiger Press) and The Fantastic Mr Wani by Kanako Usui (Little Tiger Press). The picture above is of board member Emmanuella Dekonor with one of our judges, HRH The Countess of Wessex.
Soon after, Laureate Andrew Motion was a fascinating and fascinated interviewer of Laureate Jacqueline Wilson at an event at the Soho Theatre.
In October I went to the Frankfurt Bookfair and a meeting in Mainz with the EUREAD group where European plans for Bookstart schemes are being hatched.

On National Poetry Day I met up with poet Debjani Chatterjee at an event to celebrate 'Poetry in the Waiting Room', an amazing project co-ordinated by Rogan Wolf who I first met at the Poetry Society when he approached us for support. Rogan has been committed to the project ever since and it has grown and grown. Debjani and I were both in a writers' group called Poets Plc back in the Eighties.

November began with the announcement of the winner of the third Booktrust Teenage Prize. It was obvious from her gasp on hearing the news that Sarah Singleton did not expect to win with Century, her first novel.
Meanwhile lorries have been setting off from our distribution centre in Newcastle loaded with Treasure Boxes and Bookstart Plus bags for the expanded Bookstart scheme. The team are working their socks off to support local schemes around the country as they cope with the challenges of this remarkable investment in the future of reading.