Wokingham Children’s Book Festival
Come along to Wokingham Children Book Festival to find out about my Earth Friends books! My event is Saturday 16th October at 9.45am.
Join bestselling author Holly Webb for a brilliant event exploring her fantastic Earth Friends series and meet friends, Maya, Izzy, Poppy and Emily and discover how small changes can make a big difference to us and the world around us. Exploring themes of environmentalism and friendship, this is not an event to be missed!
Join me for a live Animal Stories event on Thursday 26th March at 10am.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3cKLd7RkTdo2Osh1_Y2NmQ?view_as=subscriber
Authors and illustrators are responding to the Coronavirus outbreak by creating loads of resources that children, teachers and families can access from home. These include videos, live broadcasts and printables. Huge thanks to the brilliant Caryl Hart for coordinating this!
So if you are self-isolating and looking for fun things to do, check out what we have for you!
#FreeBookResources
Whatever platform you use, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, search for the hashtag #FreeBookResources and you’ll find loads of amazing things that you and your children can do at home.
Author Live Broadcasts on Instagram
We’re putting together a timetable of LIVE events on Instagram that you can tune into. The beauty of a LIVE event is that you can post comments for the person broadcasting. They can then respond to those comments in real time.
Here’s what we have so far. Keep checking back for updates!
Please note that all times are UK time.
Monday 16 March
2.00 – 2.30
Me!
Holly Webb – Museum Kittens: The Midnight Visitor
I’m starting off with Museum Kittens – find out about the stories behind my new series, and hear the first chapter of The Midnight Visitor!
Here’s a link to my Instagram to watch!
Wednesday 18 March
2.00 – 2.30
Jonathan Emmett – The Clockwork Dragon
The Kingdom of Rodney is being terrorised by Flamethrottle the dragon. Fortunately Max, a young toymaker, and Lizzie, an armourer, are more than a match for this man-eating monster and the two of them come up with a clever plan to drive the dragon away.
Join author Jonathan Emmett for a live reading of The Clockwork Dragon, his picture book illustrated by Elys Dolan.
Find Jonathan on Instagram here
Thursday 19 March
11.00-11.30
Caryl Hart – Meet the Planets
Join Caryl on a Rocket Ship flight through space to meet all the planets in our solar system – and learn some Fun Space Facts Too!
Here’s Caryl’s Instagram to watch
And from 5.00-5.30pm…
Toby Little – Dear World, How Are You?
Thirteen year old Toby has written and received letters from every country in the world – over 1200 letters so far!
Free Resources
There are loads of brilliant free book resources available to print and use at home – here are just a few!
So excited about going to the Moscow Book Fair this weekend!
My events are Saturday 8th September at the Fair, Pavilion 75 at 1pm, with signing afterwards.
Then at Chitay Gorod Bookshop, Megamall “European”, Kievsky Train station square 2, 4th Floor at 5pm.
Hoping to see lots of readers there!
I’m hopefully going to visit Moscow again this year – for the Moscow Book Fair early in September. Exact dates and more details when I have them! This photo is from my lovely trip back in 2017.
Come and join the launch of Reading Children’s Festival at the launch event, Forbury Fiesta, on Saturday 11th May. I’ll be doing two storytime events, at 11am and 11.45am, with a chance to draw your own book covers and make cat bracelets too. My events will be in the bandstand, and there will be lots of other fun things to do all over Reading’s Forbury Gardens.
Come and hear a kitten story, and make a glittery kitten picture at Hungerford Library on Friday September 14th, 4pm.
I’ve just been on my third author visit to Russia! This time it was to St Petersburg and Kaliningrad. It was really great to visit such a different Russian city.
I did one event in St Petersburg, talking about all my different books, and the inspiration behind them, and then answering questions. I’ve been thinking about the cats at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg ever since Tatiana from Eksmo, my Russian publisher, told me about them. And at this event I was asked if I’d ever write about them. It’s definitely a sign that I should!
Kaliningrad is a plane journey away from St Petersburg, and it looks very different. It has a beautiful modern cathedral with huge windows.
It’s lovely at night too!
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Kaliningrad is really famous for producing amber, and I got to visit the amber museum, which is housed in part of the old city fortress walls.
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Amber is ancient fossilised tree sap, and the museum has a collection of the rarest sort of amber, which has leaves and insects from hundreds of thousands of years ago trapped inside. Sadly, this just proves that I’m still scared of spiders even if they’re hundreds of thousands of years old! But I loved the fir cone encased in amber.
This is one of the beautiful paintings I was given at my event in a wonderful children and families library in Kaliningrad – it has amber pieces decorating it! I love the swirly Van Gogh style of this tree too.
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I was given so much beautiful artwork, including this cat, which I really love!
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Maisie Hitchins is really popular in Russia at the moment, which is so exciting – it’s great that Russian children are reading about a girl detective racing around Edwardian London! This is just one of the drawings of Maisie.
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The main reason for the trip to Kaliningrad was to be part of the opening celebrations for a new bookshop – always the loveliest event for an author! The shop is part of the Bookvoet group, and they had invited lots of authors to take part – it was brilliant to meet them all. Bookvoet also commissioned cartoons of each author with a famous monument in Kaliningrad – this is mine!
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Lots more photos of amazing artwork will be up soon on the pics page!
Pangbourne is a village really close to where I live, and around us a lot of libraries have been threatened with closure. My local library is about to have its hours slashed yet again, despite being busy and fabulous and full of great books and things to do. The staff and volunteers at Pangbourne asked me to talk about my Animal Stories series at the library during the Easter holidays – and they even let us cover the library in glitter.
I love meeting readers at events like this one – it was lovely that so many people brought books to be signed, and we even had a Maisie Hitchins in costume, with Eddie the dog! I also got to meet Addison, who brought me her own animal story to read, about a pug called Luna. Luna loves cupcakes – a dog after my own heart…
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You can read all of Addison’s story on the Your Stories page.
Come and hear all about the animals behind my books at Pangbourne Library over Easter! There’ll be a kitten craft afterwards too, and a chance to get your books signed. See you there!
