Michael Byrne
About Author
Michael Byrne worked as an English teacher in a secondary school just a mile from Heathrow. He then moved to Winchester to work as an airport taxi driver. The irony is not lost on him. Michael lives with his daughter Eve and their cat Chloe in Hampshire. He is now a full time writer; Lottery Boy is his first novel and he is working on his second novel for Walker Books.
Interview
LOTTERY BOY
WALKER BOOKS
MAY 2015
Lottery Boy by Michael Byrne is a tense and exciting debut about Bully, a 12 year old boy who lives alone on the streets of London following the death of his mum. When Bully finds a winning lottery ticket, he asks for help from his friends on the street to claim his prize as he is underage. This sets off a life and death chase across London as word gets out about Bully's winnings which others want to claim for themselves. As the tension mounts, the stakes increase for Bully who has just five days to claim the prize before the ticket expires.
This gripping and satisfying novel for readers aged 12+ explores questions of identity, trust and belonging against a gritty background of inner cities and homelessness. We asked author and former teacher Michael Byrne to tell us more about his debut, Lottery Boy.
Q: Can you tell us about your path from teacher to writer?
A: After failing quite a lot of exams, I trained as a teacher in my late twenties and taught for several years in London. I was always writing but didn't get much time to write. It took me about ten years to finish my first novel (which I still didn't get published).
When my wife died, I stopped teaching, moved down to Winchester with my daughter and became a taxi driver. It gave me more time to write (and perhaps something else to write about). I wrote five or six novels for adults before getting this idea in my head about a boy who wins the lottery but is too young to claim his prize. I started off trying to write it for children but got so tied up thinking about adjectives and sentences that I gave up after a paragraph. Then I started again and decided I'd find out at the end who it might be for.
Q: Why do you write for teenaged readers?
A: I want to talk about serious things in an exciting way - I want to write books that look at the grey areas of right and wrong which teenagers are beginning to think about and perhaps deal with in their lives.
Q: How much has being a teacher, and in a city, influenced what you write?
A: I think probably quite a lot. Essentially, a book has to convince a child to spend, what seems to them, a long time reading it.
And as a teacher, you get a lot of feedback from children (some of it very direct) about what makes a good story. It isn't always what you expect. I remember one boy who struggled to settle down and concentrate on anything much talking about The Bridge to Terabithia being his favourite film, which is quite a thought-provoking narrative.
Teaching is a good way into a career as a writer. You get into the habit of piecing together people's lives from scraps of information about them - and the same goes for living in a city too - deciding in a moment from a snatched conversation on the tube, or a look on someone's face, what they are thinking, what they are like and extrapolating that into a character in a story.
Q: Why do you feature a lottery ticket in this book and are you a regular player? What would be your first indulgence purchase if you won?
A: A lottery ticket is a great metaphor to play around with - and I do that in the book. There's the lottery in real life and then there's the lottery of life, that we all win something in, and I enjoyed writing about that. Also, I taught some boys who bought tickets illegally and I used to wonder what they would do if they actually won. Who would they trust to claim their prize? It was only after I'd stopped teaching that the idea came back to me as a story.
I never play the lottery myself but my wife used to play it and I used to say, why don't you just give me a couple of pounds every week and occasionally I'll give you a tenner back - but she said that wasn't the same thing!
I think the appeal of the lottery is the equality it seems to bring to your chances - you've got just as much chance as everyone else. I enjoyed imagining what Bully might want to spend his money on - and some of the things he wants to buy are what I would want to spend my money on too, like a jet pack and wall-to-wall TV...
If I did win a lot of money though, I would probably buy a beach hut in Mudeford (they're very expensive) and live in it all summer.
Q: You give Bully a very tough life; is that influenced by what you learned about the challenging backgrounds of some of your pupils when you were teaching?
A: A few children I taught really struggled just to stay in the room. It was almost always boys, unable to express themselves and half the time needing to do something, instead of just sitting down, listening. (Boys are like dogs I think: you need to let them off the lead and give them a run round the park every day.)
What I have learnt is: change is hard and the best time to try to change your life is when you're young, but paradoxically, it's often the most difficult time to do it because you don't always have the awareness and the ability to understand where you're going wrong.
Q: How did you develop Bully's character and voice? Did you need to 'write' him into existence or did you immediately have a sense of who he was?
A: I did have quite a clear sense of who he was. Like most characters in books, he's a composite of the real and the imagined. My father was very poor as a child and would spend all day at the age of five or six wandering around the river on his own, so I drew on that.
Originally, I imagined him as a slightly younger boy but when I made him a little older, I wanted to keep the naivete and the knowingness mixed up together because often boys around twelve or thirteen still have both. Teenage years are a strange time for children. They often put a childlike faith in people adults might distrust, whilst at the same time they can be incredibly cynical about the world they inhabit.
Q: Why did you make London your setting; do you prefer to work with real rather than imagined settings?
A: I'm a bit scared of London myself, so I used that fear or at least a sense of being unsettled when I'm there, and developed it for the book. I've never written anything fantastical. I like to make the real seem strange rather than the other way round.
Q: What did you personally love and hate about working / living in London?
A: I used to love the coffee shops: they were everywhere and when I was teaching I would rush home from work and go the nearest one on the High Street, pretending to myself I'd been there all afternoon.
I also love the way that London can surprise you, suddenly changing in a few streets from posh to poor and back again, especially the shops. I like the mixture basically.
What I hated was the traffic and the noise, everyone in a rush (including me), whatever the time of day.
Q: The pace of the story moves very quickly and with a lot of tension. Do you think that stories for young people need to be able to compete with other media, especially computer games? And can they?
A: Yes, when things kick off, it's a bit of thrill ride. I think everything is in competition for young people's attention nowadays. But they seem to handle it. I think reading can compete even with the best CGI graphics on screen because the world the reader creates is an absolute one-off virtual reality and unique. When you read, it's just you thinking and feeling and seeing it in your head, your way. And you don't get to do that with many things nowadays.
Q: What about young people writing their own stories? Are we doing enough to encourage them to write creatively? What are your best tips for getting young people writing?
A: I think schools can undermine children's creativity by over managing it sometimes. Teachers have to implement a curriculum and too often that doesn't leave enough room for day dreaming. Children need to stretch out, to write things without worrying about sentence structure and adjectives and punctuation - to just write things that have no point to them at all. Some inventions (Post-it notes, non-stick frying pans, the discovery of graphene) came about from people just messing around with other stuff and the same goes for some of the best stories too, I'm sure.
Q: What were the books you enjoyed sharing the most with your students?
A: I think the book I enjoyed teaching most was Treasure Island when I was on my teaching practice. I struggled to keep the children's interest at times, which was mostly my fault as I was learning how to teach. Then one day, we read this bit about treasure and skeletons and pirates and did some work on it and went to the library. There was a bit of a commotion and when I looked over, two boys were having a stand-up fight over who was going to take the last copy of Treasure Island out. I shouldn't condone violence but I was quite pleased to see two children being so passionate about books.
Q: Have you shared Lottery Boy with students at your old school and if so, what kind of feedback did you get?
A: No I haven't. I would like to go back to where I first started teaching at Lampton School in Hounslow and see what they think, although they wouldn't be the students I taught of course as they're grown-up now.
Q: Where do you do your writing and how does your writing day go?
A: I write in the kitchen most of the time and move upstairs some days when it's really cold. I like looking out the window a lot. I used to work very early when I was driving a taxi, and write whenever I had a few hours free. Nowadays though, I get up and write from about eight or nine to one or two o'clock and then it's lunch. I do a bit of wandering about, write a bit more and maybe go for a cycle or a run or just read until my daughter gets home from college.
Q: What are you writing now?
A: It's called MaDe uP, about a boy whose made-up friend seems to know more than he imagines...
Q: What is your favourite escape from writing?
A: Wandering about, cycling along looking at stuff, going to the cinema when it's empty. I like fixing stuff, cars and things. I'm not naturally good at it but I like trying to think differently about practical, useful things.
Lottery Boy
