Norwich School’s Upper Three pupils were joined by Year 6 pupils from four Norfolk schools to take part in a book festival in the Blake Studio on Tuesday.
Kirsty Applebaum kicked off the day speaking about her three very different books: The Middler, The life and time of Lonny Quicke and Troofriend. She spoke most about Troofriend, which is set in the near future, at a time when robots who are programmed to behave like best friends have been invented and released for sale. It follows the story of Sarah, whose parents buy her the latest model as they are too busy to spend much time with her.
Kirsty spoke about the inspiration for all of her books and showed how even a book set in the future was in fact influenced by her own childhood and the fictional robots she encountered on tv. The children collectively workshopped ideas for a new story using prompts and voting for their favourite elements.
The talk was rounded off with some examples of real Artificial Intelligence robots currently available, including AI pets, delivery robots and even competitive footballing robots.
Ross Montgomery spoke about his book Chime Seekers, a sinister tale set across two related but very different villages, including evil faeries, high-stake wagers and All Hallows Eve capers.
Ross talked about his experiences of writing during the pandemic, and how this influenced what and how he wrote. Pupils were tasked with imagining an evil version of their school and came up with ideas of how to make a school building sound creepy and mysterious.
Ross’s “readings” from his books were wholly original, and involved acting out scenes from the story, bringing the characters to life and making a compelling case for reading the book.
The last speaker of the day enthused the audience on the subject of trains. The Adventures on Trains series consists of six books to date, and combines adventure and mystery, with actual train journeys in a real world setting with a fictional detective.
Sam told the audience about the real-life train journeys that the different books were based on. The train journeys covered the globe, and each story contains its own crime to be solved, and in each book the detective uses his own particular style of solving the mysteries with the help of a friend or two that he makes on the way.
Each of the authors shared something of their own writing journey and offered advice to budding writers in the audience. All three were available to sign books after their talks and at the end of the day.
Local independent bookseller Book Bugs and Dragon Tales were in attendance on the day selling copies of the author’s most popular books.
