Morris Gleitzman
Morris Gleitzman
Morris Gleitzmanis an English-born Australian author of children's and young adult fiction. He has gained recognition for sparking an interest in AIDS in his controversial novel Two Weeks with the Queen...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth9 January 1953
fearless halfway humour learned maybe physically prevail primary punch quickly realised situations somebody trying using worked
Halfway through primary school, I realised that I was not as physically strong or fearless as many kids. So, in situations of conflict, I quickly learned that it worked better for me to get out of situations or maybe kind of, you know, prevail in a conflict situation by using humour than by trying to punch somebody out.
images places scary stories
Boys, particularly, like stories where they can have images in their imagination, where they can go to scary places and experiment with what can happen.
facing realised sentence soon stuck trying
I used to get stuck trying to find the first sentence of a story, then I realised that it was often because I didn't know what problem a character was facing in the story. As soon as I did, I could have the character trying to do something about it or have the problem whack him between the eyes.
aware becoming importance interested readers setting slowly stories younger
I've always been interested in setting my stories against a big event, the importance of which my younger readers are slowly becoming aware of as they move into their teens.
carries named
I've always been aware that to be named after someone from the past carries with it all kinds of bittersweetness.
age early jewish knew left life lived married named poland wife
I was named after my Jewish grandfather who left Poland early in the 20th century. What I knew from an early age was that he had lived most of his life in England, his Jewish wife had died, and he married a non-Jewish woman who was my grandmother.
despair life side stories
I would never write stories with only despair and defeat and the dark side of life.
capacity entertain largely liked people
My capacity for humour may have come largely from my father - he liked to entertain people, make people laugh.
I think probably you can either write for kids, or you can't. That ability to imaginatively be a child and see the world as a child and feel and think like a child - you either have that ability or you don't.
type
Melbourne is my type of city, much more so than Sydney.
beneath caught moved
If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.
closer discovered feelings
I discovered you can get closer to a character's thoughts and feelings in a book than in a film.
consequences either life reproduce seeking
Most of your life after puberty, you're either seeking to reproduce or living with the consequences of having done so. At 70, you start going back to being 11 again.
good interested stuff
It's our potential for good stuff I'm most interested in exploring, but that has most meaning when juxtaposed with things that can go wrong.