for the better and believe they could do this. Teenagers who might still feel the same have also become so much more aware of all the other pressures now impinging upon them.
You have written that at one stage you found the prospect of writing dialogue particularly challenging. Has that changed?
I started out writing non-fiction though I always wanted to be a novelist. But I worried whether I would ever get past the stage of writing autobiographically and be able to invent new characters in new situations. Then one day in 2005 when I had more or less given up any idea of becoming a novelist the weirdest thing happened. I was walking down the street on my way to doing some Christmas shopping and suddenly the image of a girl on a giraffe just swam into my head. Shortly afterwards while I was on one of my trips to Africa, where my parents still live, I kept thinking about this image and finally got round to jotting down a few notes. The story then poured out of me and I wrote the whole of The White Giraffe in under a month. I never had to think about the dialogue because all the character were so alive to me I simply had to write down what I somehow knew they would be saying. And by the time I had finished it three more books had already formed in my head so I had to write them down as well.
You have recently written a well-received adult novel, The Obituary Writer, and I believe a second one is being mooted. How does writing for children or adults compare?
All writing is hard and writing for children is as hard as any. But it is such a joy to me to do it at all. Every day I can have these adventures sitting at my desk but also travelling all over the world in my imagination, meeting lots of different and sometimes amazing people. I feel so fortunate.
For someone who still looks so youthful, Lauren has already produced numbers of really good books, with five titles completed in one record year. All her stories are pacey and well-written. Her autobiography, Rainbow’s End, memorably describes a childhood spent in close proximity to wild life. This extra special knowledge and interest permeates all her writing where animal issues are concerned. But there are also her cheerfully up-beat Laura Marlin Mystery Series, which may have taken some of their inspiration from the adventure stories of Enid Blyton but are so much better written and constructed. Winning the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award in 2011 for Dead Man’s Cove must surely be the first of many other literary prizes still to come.
New in the White Giraffe series: Operation Rhino, Orion Children’s Books, 978-1-4440-1273-6, £6.99
Lauren’s Laura Marlin Mystery Series and The One Dollar Horse books are also published by Orion Children’s Books.
Nicholas Tucker is honorary senior lecturer in Cultural and Community Studies at Sussex University.
Books for Keeps No.221 November 2016 9
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