We are delighted to welcome Geraldine McCaughrean, twice winner of the CILIP Carnegie Medal (1988 and 2018) to the blog.  Geraldine is one of today's most successful and highly regarded children's authors. In addition to the Carnegie, she has won the  Whitbread Children's Book Award (three times), the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, the Smarties Bronze Award (four times) and the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award. In 2005 she was chosen from over 100 other authors to write the official sequel to J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Peter Pan in Scarlet was published in 2006 to wide critical acclaim.

Without ever leaving my desk, I have journeyed to many, many countries to gather up their history, flora, fauna, traditions, climate and adventure-potential. Usually, it’s because I have just discovered some morsel of historical fact that has intrigued me into starting a book. I crave to take a reader somewhere they’re unlikely to have been – unlikely ever to go: Antarctica, for instance, or 13^th century Cathay or Noah’s Ark – somewhere that will take both of us out of ourselves and shake us like a rug.

In my latest novel, The Supreme Lie, the tiny country of Afalia is even farther afield in a way, because it’s invented. As its name suggests, it’s flawed, and prey to all those too-familiar faults: rich owners / poor workers, corruption, scheming ambition, too great a split between countryside and city, and an economy based on too few products. The catalyst for the plot is a flood. And a real flood was the historical fact that sparked the novel: the great Mississippi flood of 1928.

However, this time I set myself the task of inventing an entirely fictional country, complete with geography, fauna, a back story and a plausible assortment of residents. It’s the first time I’ve ever attempted it, and I can recommend it as enormous fun! Also, it means that no-one will be able to pull me up on my factual content!

I never set out to include an ‘issue’ or ‘moral’ or ‘life lesson’: all I’m after is adventure, entertainment and interesting characters the reader can love, hate and mind about. But somehow some preoccupation usually creeps out from behind my brain and insinuates itself into the story. This time it was the power of the Press and the fallibility of those to whom we look hopefully for leadership, exemplary wisdom and to keep our best interests at heart. Just so long as Adventure comes first: Adventure and The Cast, of course. The Villain, the Good Guy, the Innocent, the Chorus ... can characterisation really be as bald as that? It doesn’t feel like it. My actors seem to walk into their roles from somewhere else and, from then on, do half the work, take half the decisions, surprise me. It’s the chief joy of writing fiction – for me, anyway.

In this case I’ve even included animals, who provided a different perspective and also did things I wasn’t expecting. When I was at junior school and we were allowed to write stories, we were usually given a theme. But whatever the theme, my stories were always about horses. I was horse mad, but horseless. So, I rode an invisible horse to school, holding my satchel strap for reins. Since then, I’ve rather neglected the four-legged species. So here are Daisy and Heinz, doggedly doggy, town and country, chalk and cheese, destined only briefly to meet.  

You could say, my books come not from experience but from the lack of it, starting off with a lack of horse and moving on through a lack of daring, travel, influence or genius. (Well, look at that! I’m the inversion of Katherine Rundell!)

Oh, but there’s that other place they come from: the other place to which I rode my invisible horse: the Library. Talking to top juniors the other day, I asked them to picture the characters, after dark, descending on ropes from the bookshelves of their School Library – kings and gods, giant apes and sailors, Roman soldiers and Odin’s eight-legged horse. Night time fetches them out from beneath their covers, to fraternise on the Story Mat and for Sleipnir to graze on the carpet pile.

That is how I still choose to envisage libraries: their books the serried rows of beds in which stories lie dozing, waiting for the reader to find them and take them home for a memorable interchange of ideas. While library doors have been closed, imagine the panic of their numberless inmates inexplicably cut off from a career of entertaining and stimulating the young - the bored - the restless – the lonely minds.

I’ll be seventy this year. I never meant to be, but accidents happen, and here it comes, like a charging bull, to toss me out of the way, maybe, and make room for younger authors. Well, it can try ... but it won’t stop me writing. I spent a glorious lockdown writing poems, plays and, of course, another book.  And while those invented characters remain in my imagination – before they slip away from me to pursue their lives in someone else’s head – I shall point them in the direction of libraries and tell them what comrades they will find there, what cross-fertilization, what magic, as the words jumble and tumble from book to book on the long dark shelves, in the dead of night. 

Visit www.geraldinemccaughrean.co.uk to find out more about Geraldine’s work.

Twitter: @GMcCaughrean

The Supreme Lie is available now from Usborne Publishing for readers age 12+ £8.99

Thank you to Geraldine McCaughrean for the blog and to Liz Scott for the opportunity.  Do check out the readers' notes below.