Audio morsels from Elsewhere

It's all go in the land of Elsewhere... Not only do we have our very exciting Twitter Q&A with Marcus Sedgwick on Saturday at 1200, we've also got a number of exclusive interviews with our authors talking about how they explored the theme of elsewhere in their stories. Today we feature two of these - but keep checking the blog over the next days as we'll be adding more!

Julia Donaldson's story on the theme of elsewhere, 'The Ballad of Jemmy Button', is really a song but it also works as a narrative poem. It centres on the story of the voyage of the Beagle, on which Charles Darwin was the ship's naturalist, and its mission to take some of the natives of Tierra del Fuego back to England. In our exclusive interview with her below, Julia tells us why she was drawn to write about this episode in colonial history and how it explores the idea of elsewhere.




Gill Arbuthnott's story 'Marilyn's Hands' takes as its starting point the idea of elsewhere being on the outside, of not being quite part of the normal swing of things. Her story is very different from what she normally writes - it is for adults rather than children and has a distinct science fiction theme. She tells us in our interview below how she explored her own background in science and themes of identity and being an outsider in her wonderful story.



Also - we've started releasing audio recordings of some of our authors reading their stories. You can subscribe on iTunes to make sure you get the recordings as they are released. We've already got Anne Fine and Roddy Doyle up and will be adding three a week for the next few months.