Archive for

I have always wanted to have the last word only I am not the sort of person who comes up with it on the spur of the moment. For me, to write is to think so the last word usually occurs to me well after the conversation is over. But because the eVolution debate happened online and I have some control it, being one of the creators, I have been...

The word ‘palimpsest’ is not usually found in an eleven-year’s vocabulary, even a word-loving kid, as I was. I learnt it only because my family were living in England My mother had, with the idea of keeping her children occupied and also engaged with the history around us, got us brass-rubbing. Armed with heelball from the cobbler’s and Macklin’s Memorial Brasses, we descended upon the medieval churches of Britain. “St...

In P3 (as grade 3 is known in Northern Ireland) my teacher began reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit. It probably comes as no surprise to anyone who knows the books I’ve illustrated that it left an indelible impression on me. But what might be a surprise is that I wasn’t interested in drawing before then. Apart from a Dalek (perhaps the hardest thing to draw badly after-all it is just an...

Recently my boyfriend and I broke up. When the recriminations and the laments were done, my parting request was that he return my copy of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. He’d borrowed it months earlier, promising to return it swiftly but instead inching through each essay with painful protraction. In the weeks that we’d been falling apart, I had hinted how much I wanted it back, but he kept insisting...

I am a reader.  I don’t mind how or where I read a book as long as I can lose myself in a story. Reading allows me to escape to another time and place; makes me gasp, cry or laugh; makes me think about how I would act in a similar situation; or takes me on a journey that otherwise I would never have experienced.  Books in all their methods of delivery...

My name is Nick and I’m a gamer. I enjoy playing games, and I enjoy making them. I’ve spent the last 15 years working as a video game developer and now myself, and two of my long-time collaborators, have started a new venture taking our lessons from games development and applying them to digital books. If you’re not a gamer and have no interest in gaming culture, then you might...

It was like a small death – a lemming leaping over the precipice with the mob because someone thought it was a good idea. Only to survive and wonder how you could be convinced such an act could be constructive in the short or long term. At 21 I relinquished the loves of my young life, the booksof my childhood, for a worthy cause. Not my worthy cause – the...

I am not tremendously for or against ebooks – they simply are but one more form that stories can take. Unlike newspapers, I think there will always be a market for printed books, and that print will remain the preferred form for illustrated books in particular. At A&U they have been part of our lives for several years now. Our ebook queen Elizabeth Weiss, also our Academic publisher, felt the...

From the moment my mother first introduced me to the written word I have been a book worm. Always curious, always questioning and always devouring new stories and adventures – eager to dig in and become all consumed. I love the smell of pages, the weight of the story in my hands, the dog-eared corners and scribbled margins. It was for these reasons that I was wary of the eBook...

E-books are brilliant. I don’t like e-books. These two statements sum up my feelings about e-books, and rather than try to resolve the paradox by choosing one side or another, I’m going to let the paradox stand and be a thing in itself. When I am waiting at the doctor’s surgery (she’s always late, but I keep going because she is a great doctor and has long, curly, red hair...