HELLO KATIE
This is one of my favourite images of Katie - I am not sure who took it
And here some very recent pictures of her, taken in Rome a couple of weeks ago. The photographer is Angus Ramsay
I
first met Katie when she and I were on the Wellington Storylines Committee now
several years ago. One of my most colourful memories of her is just before one
of the Storylines Family Days here in Wellington and we had enthusiastically
but possibly rather over ambitiously decided to fill the quite large venue with
balloons – I know that it did take a very long time to prepare them – surely we
had a mechanical aid for this?
I will see if I can find the photo of Katie surrounded by
balloons - she was such an
enthusiast she probably would have blown them up herself if need be. Later: Sadly this now seems to have
vanished from the files. (I found many fascinating photos from the past while I
was looking for it though)
Katie herself seemed to vanish from my
life as people do sometimes but I heard she had gone to Auckland to work as the
Commissioning Editor for the Penguin Group. Then, about six weeks ago, to my great delight, I had an
email from Susie Kennewell, the publicist at The Five Mile Press in Australia
asking if I would like to see one of their new books Petunia Paris’s Parrot written by a New Zealander but now living in
the UK and working as the Senior Commissioning Editor at Templar Publishing in
Chelsea, London – Katie Haworth. So. That is how this ‘Talking To’ interview
has come about …
Hello Katie
I feel there is some catching up to do here!
Would you like to share a potted version of what has happened in your working
life since you left New Zealand two years ago?
Well, I left Penguin New
Zealand in February 2014 and travelled to London – via a few other countries as
well. There were a few reasons for this. I loved Penguin and NZ, but I wanted
to work in a country where the publishing industry was big enough to specialise
more – it would be very difficult to just be a picture book editor in NZ, like
I am now. When I got to London I spent maybe six weeks madly interviewing for
publishing jobs at different companies – actually it was wonderful way to learn
about the industry over here – and I started working at Templar in May 2014.
Seems an age ago now. I’ve now been at Templar more than two years and I’ve
been lucky enough to work on some fabulous books. This includes picture books
and non-fiction such as Historium and Botanicum in the Welcome to the Museum
series. I’ve also been doing a lot of spoken word poetry around London. I was
actually inspired to do this by Dr Selena Tusitala Marsh who I saw performing
at the Australia and New Zealand Festival of Literature and the Arts in London
last year. I loved what she did and thought – I want to give that a go.
I only
started trying to write picture books when I came to London. I think part of
the reason for that was an excited, energised reaction to a new place, but also
the sense that London is so big no-one cares what you do, which can be very
liberating creatively.
Petunia Paris’s Parrot is such a thoughtful story as well as being very funny. It
arrived just as the children were about to break up for the holidays so I
haven’t had a chance to share it with a group – yet. Is there a back-story here? How did Petunia
come about? (*Later – I have now had a chance to share the books
with children. As I thought it went down wonderfully well and they especially
liked the last colourful pages).
I’m often frustrated by
consumer society’s tendency to throw stuff at a problem in the hope it will fix
it. I’ve been guilty of attempted shopping therapy myself. The basis of many
advertising campaigns is that having a new thing will make us happy. When I
first moved to London I also had a flatmate who was a teacher at a very wealthy
London private school and some of her work stories – we’re talking children
coming home from school holidays with stories of amphibious launches and private
islands – were horrifyingly fascinating to me. I also like big characters and
improbable worlds – so setting something with a sort of New York Park Road
mansion backdrop was very fun. It means I can create mothers with ridiculous
feather hats and invent characters that are long-suffering butlers.
By browsing your Facebook Pages I find that Petunia was not your first book. Terrible Tim (sadly not available here
in New Zealand) looks amazingly energetic and there may be others? Yes?
So far Terrible Tim and
Petunia are the first picture books, but also look out for Emma Jane’s
Aeroplane due January 2017 . . .
Do you have ‘access’ to a large (or even small) group of
children on whom to try out your ideas and to whom to read your work?
Not really. I maybe
should – I did have a lot of fun reading Petunia to a friend’s Brownie pack when it was at
proof stage. I got them to be the parrot (squaark). When I was at Mallinson
Rendel I spent a lot of time touring with Lynley Dodd and I think watching her
and other authors interact with young audiences has given me an insight into
how children will interact with a book.
Have you always been involved with books and stories? Were
you a ‘Book Child’? Did you use the public library much when you were a little
girl growing up in Auckland? Did you have
access to a good school/ college library?
Do you remember any books you loved to pieces when you were small?
My Mum is an obsessive
book buyer and our house was always bursting with books. We used libraries too,
but I have much fonder memories of the books that I owned and sometimes ate
(literally. When I was reading Maurice Gee’s Halfmen
of O series I got so involved I’d rip
corners off the book and chew them. Forgive me, ladies and gentlemen of the
book-loving jury, I was eight and hungry for literature . . .). I have fond
memories of the North Shore Library and I still remember my Ancient Egyptian
phase (I learned from a North Shore library book that Egyptian Pharaohs married
their siblings – Blurgh!) and my Judy Blume phase, all library fuelled. We used
to have a lot of good NZ and Australian fiction at home and I grew up with Gee,
Mahy, Cowley, William Taylor, Mary Grant Bruce, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, Peter Gossage, the Armitage’s Lighthouse
keeper books and too many more to name.
What support is there for new and emerging young writers,
particularly of children’s books, in London?
Is there a similar event to our Book Awards for Children and
Young Adults held in the UK?
There is, of course, a
much large population density in the UK, so there are lots of regional events.
Edinburgh Festival, from which I’ve just returned , has a great children’s
programme, as does Hay Festival, Imagine Children’s Festival in Southbank
London, the Bristol Festival and many others. There are a number of children’s
book awards such as the Waterstones Awards, the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal, the
Roald Dahl Funny Prize. For new writers I think groups like SCBWI British Isles
(http://britishisles.scbwi.org) are
very helpful because they help writers network and it’s a lonely profession.
The bookshops
here (and my own bookshelves) are full of stories for children and young adults
by writers from the UK (and the USA
and Australia.) How much New Zealand material do you find in bookshops (and
libraries) in London?
There isn’t much – I tend
to see Lynley Dodd; Ronda and David Armitage; some of Gavin Bishop’s Gecko
Press titles; Kate de Goldi . . . actually when you consider that
we’re a country with half the population of just London that’s not bad. Oh! And
Templar did publish Vasanti Unka’s Stripes!
No! Spots! in the UK.
There are a lot of
children’s books from overseas here though – so it’s not all British by any
stretch. We get a lot of good European books translated into English like Maps by the Polish illustrator/writer couple Aleksandra Mizielinska
and Daniel Mizielinski.
Where would you like to see yourself in the world of books
in 10 years time in 2026? Do you think there will be big changes in the ways
children and young people access not so much non-fiction but stories by then?
I hope I will still be
there! I’d still like to be publishing and writing. Something! Anything! I just want to be playing some part in
telling stories.
I honestly don’t know the answer to the
second question. Non-fiction publishing for children has, for example, recently
become focussed on beautiful illustrated books and high quality formats and
very much tied to the physical book.
That wasn’t expected even
in 2013 when I went to the Click on Kids conference in Sydney, which was a seminar
exploring digital publishing for children. We were saying things at that time
about non-fiction publishing being very, very difficult. In the UK now it’s a massively
successful and innovative area. Titles like Animalium illustrated by Katie Scott or Shakleton’s Journey by Will Grills have gone gangbusters in the
UK.
I
honestly think children will still enjoy and respond to words and pictures on a
page. In 2026 there may be different ways of doing this, but I think the core
heart of what storytelling is won’t have changed that much.
At the
moment it’s still actually very hard to get interactive book apps to work
commercially. They are hugely expensive to make but the price consumers are
prepared to pay is often much lower than for a book – digital is perceived as
more ephemeral.
There
are interesting possibilities for things like augmented reality. How do we take
a format like Pokemon Go and use that in narrative?
Thanks so much
Katie and I look forward to seeing and talking about Emma Jane’s Aeroplane early next year.
