Meet Marv – Superhero for a new generation
Alex Falase-Koya talks to Pen&inc. about getting started as a writer, and his new series of superhero books featuring Marv as he battles super villains, robot sharks and rampaging dinos.
A NEW series of superhero books hit the shelves earlier this year from author Alex Falase-Koya, who says Marv is the type of character he would have loved growing up. Alex, who co-wrote The Breakfast Club Adventures (Macmillan Children’s Books) with footballer Marcus Rashford, launched a six book series of adventures in February with Marv and the Dino Attack and Marv and the Mega Robot, illustrated by Paula Bowles and published by Oxford University Press. The third book in the series, Marv and the Pool of Peril arrives in July.
Alex says that Marv is an extension of his early writing – stories and characters that Alex wrote for himself. He says: “I always wrote things that I found interesting and that I found cool. But, as I got older and understood more about the industry you get a better understanding of what would work – so you think about age groups. As time goes on your writing develops to better resemble the types of things that do go on to be published.
“My passion has always been children’s literature. That was what inspired me because it was the stuff I was really interested in when I was growing up, and so that was we what I wanted to make.
Spring-Summer 2022
I loved reading Michael Morpurgo and Darren Shan books, and I also really enjoyed Malorie Blackman.”
Despite his love of writing, Alex’s early career went in a different direction. He studied computer science at university, but continued to write. He says: “[Writing] was always something that I would have loved to do, but it always felt so difficult.”
That difficulty in breaking into an industry as competitive as writing is not uncommon, but for under-represented writers and artists it can be even more difficult. However, by continuing to write Alex was able to develop and hone his skills, and in 2019 he took the first serious step on the road to becoming an author. Spread the Word’s London Writer competition was created to help redress the balance and help create a more diverse talent pool. The annual competition, which launched in 2018, included a category for YA and children’s authors. In 2019 Alex tried his luck. He says: “At that time I was writing on and off, it was something I wanted to do more of but I was doing other things. I remember being on holiday in Portugal, and the deadline was coming up and I kept thinking about – am I going to apply, am I not. But I was talking to my
girlfriend and she said I should just go for it. I ended up writing an application and the piece I included was a young adult piece. Then I just forgot about it, until months and months later when I got an email to ask if I’d like to be part of the mentoring programme. “ The prize included a year of mentoring and development, which Alex says “was very cool, because I always wrote as an individual, but you then become part of a group of people who are all writing
Alex as a young superhero. PEN&INC. 21
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