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Comment from the book world in December 2012

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On first becoming a writer

31 December 2012

'I first became aware of my need for this twice-lived life at the age of 12 during my time at boarding school in Hertfordshire. I was dawdling back across the lovely hayfield that separated the tennis courts from the garden of the main school house when I was stopped in my tracks by the beauty of the June light on the field. I stood very still. I felt, in a memorably passionate way, that what I wanted was to possess the field, to capture it and my feelings about it in orderto recreate the totality of that lived moment at some future time on paper. You could say that I became a writer on that summer day in 1955.'


Rose Tremain in the Sunday Telegraph

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Texting - a springboard to poetry

17 December 2012

'The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We've got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future - and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It's a kind of time capsule - it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form...

The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language ... it's language as play. I think it's most obvious in music, if you look at rapping, for example, a band like Arctic Monkeys uses lyrics in a poetic way. And using words in an inventive way is at the heart of youth culture in every way...

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing. I'd write them out by hand, and it was that very physical act that led me to become a writer. It was quite an intimate experience of poetry, and that's what I'd like us to go back to now with children.'

Carol Ann Duffy in an interview in the Guardian

'A fanbase of millions'

10 December 2012

 'I don't think people always understand the scale of what we have done in the past 12 months. The level of work has been very intense. What we've done with Pottermore is harness a fanbase of millions of the biggest Harry Potter fans. In terms of producing value to all of the rights holders - be it J K Rowling, Bloomsbury, Scholastic, Warner Bros, or indeed our sponsor Sony - that's an immensely valuable thing, as any new books, content or products come out. For any launch we have a direct relationship with those fans already, who we can then engage with...


'If you have a brand that is very relevant to 11 to 15-year olds, it is clear to me that they consume more content on YouTube than on TV, for example. So therefore we have to think very carefully about what we do for Harry Potter and Pottermore in that environment... 


The convergence of media challenges existing right structures that were put together at a time when there was clear blue water between what film companies did and what film companies did. There is a lot in the middle that you could do great stuff with, if the film and publishing companies got together and said" your rights, my rights, let's put them together and do something amazing on YouTube, with in-flight entertainment, or on tablet devices." But in many cases, they look across suspiciously at each and don't speak to each other, so that stuff in the middle drops through.' Pottermore is about doing all those  thing in the middle.'


Charlie Redmayne, CEO of Pottermore


Pottermore

'Advice to aspiring writers'

3 December 2012

'Read. But assuming they are already people who can't sit down at breakfast without reading the cereal packet, then I would say write the sort of things you like to read. Don't write what anybody else tells you is popular. Publishers don't know - all they know is what were last year's bestsellers. The insolence of daring to say to you what ought to be written. Disregard it.'


Philip Pullman in The Times