Bob's Journal

Netflix, Spotify, iPads, YouTube and Instagram are just a few things that didn't exist when the Children's Laureate was set up 20 years ago.

In 1999, the main obstacle in getting children interested in reading was their own attention spans.  Read more

A total of 94% of authors in the U.K. are white, with 2% Asian, 2% mixed race, and 1% black. (4% identify as "other.") The most recent census, in 2011, put the white population of the U.K. at 86%.  Read more

There are as many different author photos as there are authors (naturally), but if you look at a lot of them, as I do in my line of work, you begin to notice some trends. Some are good. Some are perplexing. Some are straightforward, while others are more mysterious. Here, I attempt to create a taxonomy of some of the most common versions.

In May 2018, Olga Tokarczuk and her translator Jennifer Croft won the Man Booker International Prize for Flights, a novel that was published in Poland in 2007. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, for which Tokarczuk is a Booker finalist again this year, was translated a bit faster; it only took a decade.  Read more

My entire childhood I hoped to write books, and entered the publishing industry after college on the now humorous assumption-humorously wrong, and also humorously correct for reasons I did not then understand-that being an editor would help me realize that dream. I became a full-fledged book editor in 2007, after the assumed unpaid internship and then editorial assistantship.  Read more