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
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.
deeply enjoyed found kid kids realised stories until wrote
I wrote stories as a kid just for myself. One day, some of the kids in my class found some of my stories in my bag, and I was deeply embarrassed until I realised they enjoyed reading them.
despair life side stories
I would never write stories with only despair and defeat and the dark side of life.
develop developed newly readers sort stories using
I like the idea of young readers using my stories as a sort of moral gym, where they can flex and develop their newly developed moral muscle.
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.
although characters stories struggling
Although my stories are all very different on the surface, I like to write stories about characters struggling with big problems. I'm always reminded, no matter how different from me one of my characters is from me on the surface, how we're all pretty much the same underneath.
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.
bring engaging stories
Stories can bring alive the moral universe in a very vivid, useful, engaging way.
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.
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.
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.
became finally life
When I did finally live in the Dandenongs, the mountain ash forests became an important part of my 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.