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
capacity entertain largely liked people
My capacity for humour may have come largely from my father - he liked to entertain people, make people laugh.
age decide group nine people themselves
At around nine or 10 years of age, young people start to decide for themselves what's moral or not, and that's why I like writing for that age group so much.
assumption ideas kids less opposite people physically problems smaller themes time venture
Because kids are physically smaller, there's an assumption by people who haven't read a kids' book for a long time that their ideas and themes and problems and ambitions must be commensurately smaller and less important. I would venture that sometimes the opposite is true.
act basis cruel face feeling people prevailing stories
I like to write stories where young people have a strong feeling about something being fair or unfair, right or wrong, cruel or kind, and they act on the basis of that - often in the face of the prevailing limits of behaviour.
people prefer
I prefer watching people on a screen, and I've had the most pleasurable people-watching experiences at the Palace Cinema in Balwyn.
biggest people stories type
The type of stories I write are about young people grappling with the biggest problems in their lives, often problems that are bigger than they're actually capable of solving.
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.
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.