Mal Peet
Mal Peet
Mal Peetwas an English author and illustrator best known for young-adult fiction. He has won several honours including the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize, British children's literature awards that recognise "year's best" books. Three of his novels feature football and the fictional South American sports journalist Paul Faustino. The Murdstone Trilogyis his first work aimed at adult readers...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionYoung Adult Author
Date of Birth20 June 1947
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Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.
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Although I now spend most of my time writing novels for teenagers and adults, 'readaloudability' is still a criterion I try to adhere to.
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It's extremely difficult to describe interestingly what happens on the pitch. Thousands of journalists write millions of words every week trying to do it, so your chances of avoiding cliche are very slim. And you're trying to write fiction, not a match report.
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It's a nonsense because, as we all know, there are brilliant 15-year-old readers and hopeless 50-year-old readers. All that categorisation is a matter of bookshop shelves rather than literary categories, I think.
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It pretty much defeats the purpose of bedtime reading if you fall asleep before the kids do. And you tend to wake up with a matchbox stuck on the end of your nose and/or a potty on your head.
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Football is a bit like chess: it's not just the piece being moved that matters; it's also the effect that move has on all the other pieces.
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I try to write stories that will attract younger readers and make them feel part of a wider readership. I do not feel able to write books that are about, or even for, teenagers; and I am inclined to be suspicious of books which 'target' them.
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I used to play all the time. I would play football when it was light and read when it was dark.
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A sentence that clots in your mouth is unlikely to flow in your mind.
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Normally, I'm a grumpy old man - whenever I read about celebrity, I start to grind my teeth and pull my hair; it seems synonymous with idiocy.
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After being rejected for years, I found a publisher for 'Keeper,' and it won prizes, and then I had to write a second and a third book because I kept taking the money and spending it.
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The surprising thing is that so many teenage cancer novels are very good. John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars,' recently published by Penguin, was voted 'Time Magazine''s book of the year in 2012 ahead of Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith.
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I usually have about four books on the go - a bedside book, a lavatory book, a downstairs book, and the book in my study that I read sneakily while I should be writing. Short stories for the lavatory, obviously.
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Teen authors love to flirt with taboo, to grapple - sensitively - with dark and frightening issues, and there is nothing darker and more frightening than cancer.