David Almond

David Almond was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1951. His first book, Sleepless Nights, a collection of short stories for adults, was published in 1985 and was followed in 1997 by a second volume, A Kind of Heaven. His first children's novel, Skellig, the story of a strange, part-human 'creature' who transforms the lives of two young children forever, was published to immediate acclaim in 1998. The book won both the Carnegie Medal (1998) and the Whitbread Children's Book Award (1998). In 2007, it was shortlisted for the Carnegie of Carnegies, and turned into an opera in 2008.

Susan Tranter: Welcome David, and thanks for agreeing to take part in one of our Author Interviews. Can I start by asking if you've read anything lately which you'd recommend to EnCompass readers?

David Almond: I really liked Colm Toibin's Brooklyn. And The Damned United by David Peace. Also reading and enjoying The Case For God by Karen Armstrong. I read Cry For Night by Chris Abani several months ago, and it continues to move, horrify and inspire me.

DA: It's both easy and hard. All you need is a pen and paper to get started, and a love for it and a desire to get stories down onto paper. Getting published is a different matter. For years I published short stories in little magazines and small presses, had a small number of keen readers, and made a laughable amount of money. I was happy enough. There has to be part of you that doesn't really care, and another that's thick-skinned and fairly stupid, and another that thinks you're the best writer in the world, and another that's determined to prove it. My first novel was rejected by every UK publisher. I cursed, spat and cracked on. The next novel I wrote was Skellig, which was grabbed by the first publisher that saw it, and has since been published in over 30 languages all around the world. I was an overnight success after almost twenty years! Best advice? Just do it.

JackyC: I've read that you initially started out writing adult fiction, before finding that the young adult audience was better suited to you. If this is true, what inspired this change?

DA: I didn't plan to change. The story of Skellig came out of the blue, and as I began to write it I realised, with some amazement, that it was a novel mainly for young people. I felt a great deal of freedom and excitement when I realised that. I love the variety of forms in young people's fiction: novels, short stories, picture books, illustrated fiction. It's a great field for experimentation. The fiction I've written in the past few years is far, far better than anything I wrote when I thought I was writing for adults. Of course, there are many questions here. What makes a children's book a children's book?

David1977: Would you consider writing for adults again, and if so, would you consider short stories?

DA: I do still write adult short stories, and love doing that. A couple recently in Sunday Times Magazine, and on Radio 4. I guess there'll be a collection of them before too long. And one day, before too long maybe, I think I'll find myself writing a novel that's mainly for adults.

Sandie Mourão: Your recent work involves working with illustrators. Do you think you write differently when you know your words will be illustrated? How do you work with the illustrator? Do you work as a team, together producing the end product or is there little communication between the two of you?

DA: I love working with illustrators. I suppose I leave some space for the new imagination when I know the story will be illustrated. No, we don't work as a close team, and we really have very little obvious communication. It's a kind of organic thing. But there's a wonderful meeting of minds when a great illustrator (such as Dave McKean or Polly Dunbar) brings their own vision to the story.

Celina Ishikawa: Which authors have most influenced your writing? Are they mostly authors who also deal with the fantastic, thriller or mystery? Also, do you consider your work Clay in any way related to the traditional Jewish story of The Golem?

DA: Probably every writer I've loved has influenced me. Raymond Carver, Tony Harrison, Flannery O'Connor, Seamus Heaney spring to mind, but there are many many others. I don't like straightforward fantasy, but I do love writers who blend the real and the imaginary in wonderful ways: Marquez, Borges, Calvino, for instance. And yes, Clay is directly descended from the Jewish Golem legends. In one draft, the story of the Golem was threaded through the novel (told by the teacher, Prat Parker) but I took it out as it seemed far too obvious a device. Better, and more powerful, to leave it unsaid.

ANewLeaf: Do you think it's more difficult, or less, to make it as a successful writer in the UK these days? How has publishing changed since you started your career, and what challenges are different?

DA: I don't know whether it's more difficult. Seems to me it's always been pretty difficult, and if you set out to be a writer you have to just accept that fact. Publishing has changed in many ways, I suppose. Fiction for young people is taken more seriously, I think, and agents are far more willing to look at work for children than they were a dozen years ago. For a writer, the main challenge has to remain the challenge of getting words to work, of making powerful and individual stories. Personally, I think it's a mistake to think too much about the current publishing scene, or the 'market'. You have to write the best story that you possibly can, to commit your whole self to it. If you can do that, the chances of getting published increase.

DA: Making the opera was a wonderful, invigorating, sometimes scary process. I wrote the libretto, and talked for a long time with the composer, Tod Machover and the director, Braham Murray, about how the story could be moved into operatic form. Once the libretto was done, Tod wrote the music. We made a few changes to the libretto as he went along. I went to most of the auditions and was at many of the rehearsals. I loved the end result. The opera really brings out some of the savage elements of Skellig, and has moments of great beauty and tenderness.

DA: The initial meeting between Bobby and the fire-eater comes directly from my own childhood, when I used to see an escapologist in a market in Newcastle. He fascinated and terrified me. That meeting acts as a catayst for the whole book. The whole thing burst into life once I got that first chapter right. I was the same age as Bobby Burns during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. As I wrote on, images and scenes, many of them from my childhood, came thick and fast: the Northumbrian coast, sea coalers, a mother in a red coat, a boy in a hooped T-shirt, a spinning light house light, the 11-plus, sinister teachers, a poorly father... Ideas do seem to come like that. Find the right central image or event, and they come flowing out. The story grows like a living thing.

DA: It keeps changing. I'm fond of them all, really. I do think it's important to like your own work - without being self-satisfied, of course. You have to be determined that the next book will be better than all that have gone before. I do feel very close to Counting Stars, which has so much of my family and my childhood in it. I love the blend of text and image in The Savage. I'm proud of Kit's Wilderness. The next book is The Boy Who Climbed Into The Moon, illustrated by Polly Dunbar, out in spring 2010. It's strange and funny, which makes me pleased.

DA: I've just finished a novel, The Boy Who Swam With Piranhas, which will be out in 2011. I'm well under way with a book about Mina (from Skellig) called My Name Is Mina, which will be published in August 2010. And I'm writing a play about Noah and the ark, which will be performed as part of modern-day mystery play cycle in Durham in May 2010.



Books Rest of site