Jacqueline Wilson

Jacqueline Wilson

About Author

Born in Bath, Jacqueline Wilson spent most of her childhood in Kingston-on-Thames. She always wanted to be a writer and wrote her first 'novel' when she was nine, filling countless Woolworth's' exercise books as she grew up. She started work as a journalist for D.C. Thomson in Scotland where JACKIE magazine was named after her. She has been writing full time all her adult life.

Random House Children's Books publish a host of books by Jacqueline Wilson including The Story of Tracy Beaker, which was a major children's drama series on CBBC. Double Act, Midnight and Bad Girls have been adapted for the stage. Her 'Girls' series for slightly older readers has been a huge success both here and in the States and Girls in Love was a major children's drama shown on ITV. The Illustrated Mum, starring Michelle Collins, was broadcast to great critical acclaim on Channel 4 and was awarded an EMMY and two BAFTAS. Jacqueline has been honoured by being given a special ChildLine award in recognition of the way her work gives 'unique insight into challenging subjects'

Jacqueline has been on countless shortlists and has won many awards, including the Smarties Prize, and the Children's Book Award. The Illustrated Mum won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award and the 1999 Children's Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. It was also shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Children's Book Award. The Story of Tracy
Beaker won the 2002 Blue Peter People's Choice Award.
In 2004 Jacqueline Wilson became the most borrowed author from libraries across the UK replacing Catherine Cookson at the top who had enjoyed an unbroken reign of 17 years.

A staggering 20 million copies of Jacqueline Wilson's books have now been sold and approximately 100 000 copies of her books are sold each month and they have been translated into 30 different languages.

In the BBC Big Read poll, four Jacqueline Wilson books made the Top 100 list, Double Act, Girls in Love, Vicky Angel, and The Story of Tracy Beaker.

Jacqueline was appointed the fourth Children's Laureate from 2005-2007.

For more information on Jacqueline Wilson, visit her fan club at www.kidsatrandomhouse.co.uk

Author link

www.jacquelinewilson.co.uk; www.kidsatrandomhouse.co.uk

Interview

DANCING THE CHARLESTON

DOUBLEDAY CHILDREN'S

JUNE 2019


JACQUELINE WILSON returns to the past in this engaging and fascinating novel that takes us to the 1920's when glamour, dancing and flamboyance vied with Victorian values and poverty.

The novel follows 10-year-old Mona, who has been brought up in straightened circumstances by her aunt, a dressmaker. They have always lived in a cottage on the Somerset estate but when the estate's owner dies, their future livelihood is cast into doubt until a surprising twist, together with Mona's courage and inventiveness, puts them on a very different path.

We asked author JACQUELINE WILSON to tell us more about DANCING THE CHARLESTON:


Q: What do you enjoy about stepping back into the past with stories like Dancing the Charleston and of course your Hetty Feather books?

A: It's interesting to write about an age when there wasn't social media - Particularly if I'm writing about older girls - and the same concerns around that as we have today.

Ever since writing Hetty Feather, I have also loved doing research - although not serious social history research - but I love to read novels from the period and immerse myself in that period.

I have written books set at the time of the Victorians, and both world wars, as well as the Edwardians, but I really love the 1920s. It was such an interesting period; they looked back and scorned the Victorians and that way of life and seemed a bit frenetic with the flappers and dances like the Charleston. For most ordinary people, though, life went on the same and they wouldn't have dreamt of doing the kinds of things that the 'bright young things' got up to. I wanted to show both sides of that time in Dancing the Charleston, so I wanted to include a group of privileged Edwardians as well as some ordinary families.

I like writing about a character who comes from one background but who can then get a different view of the social strata because of their background, just as I like to contrast different kinds of families, large and small, which has always fascinated me.


Q: Where do you go to find out about these periods and day-to-day life at that time?

A: There were so many different bits to think about while I was researching the novel. You can read about history but generally, those texts are more about political history than social issues and I do feel that children aren't quite aware of how different things were. If you're young you feel firmly entrenched that things have always been that way, but I want to show that in each era, lives can be very different.

For example, if you just think of the difference in classrooms now. For the most part, classrooms are a place where children don't feel frightened but I remember being very scared for being in class and for good reason, because the teachers would hit us. No one complained because when I grew up in the 50s, the feeling was so ingrained that you should know your place.

If you write about more difficult subjects with a modern character, that might be worrying for children. But if a child is locked up in a cupboard in Victorian times, they don't worry so much. So historical stories give you more scope for things to happen.


Q: Were there specific events and places you need to research - such as the Empire Exhibition?

A: The Empire Exhibition which ran for two years from 1924 to 1925 was the biggest exhibition anywhere in the world. It was extraordinary and was THE thing you had to do. Dancing the Charleston is dedicated to two gentlemen who run an antiquarian bookshop that specialises in 1920s books. They fortunately had catalogues for the Empire Exhibition and I have a map so I walked my fingers around this map and imagined where Mona would go.

There really was a huge statue of royalty carved out of butter at the exhibition and the amusements were bizarre. There was one area that was just for children and in 1925 it was possible to have an amusement area that was just for children and adults weren't allowed to enter.

Mona and her aunt also visited Harrods and I have a book about Harrods in the 1920s and what it was like then, and I love those period details although I love the idea of writing about extravagant things as well as the everyday humdrum world.

Readers will also meet a middle aged Hetty Feather popping in, I don't write many details in case I ever revisit Hetty and her story, but for now she won't be suppressed!


Q: How hard is it to bring the past to life for today's child reader?

A: This is one thing that is quite hard to grasp as a child - if they see people wearing strange clothes in a sepia photograph, it's hard to believe that those people could feel exactly the same emotions and that things could have made them roll with laughter. It's lovely to get children to see this by bringing those characters to life on the page.

So Mona, the main character, is both a very demur and turbulent girl. It's funny because as a child myself I was mostly very quiet and shy but every now and again I would say something that sounded cheeky to an adult. I wanted a child character that modern children could relate to.

For me as a writer, it is such a treat to not have to engage with anything to do with Brexit or knife crime... You step back into a world that had its own worries and troubles, but it's not something we can do anything about.


Q: Do the freedoms that children had in the past also make it easier to engage your characters in adventures?

A: Children also had much more freedom then, Mona wanders to the village with her friend and gets away with doing things that children wouldn't be able to do now. They are looked after and cossetted and don't have the same freedoms as we had in the summer holidays, for example. There was a sense of wildness and willingness to have all kinds of adventures then that won't really happen to your average child in contemporary stories.


Q: When and where do you do most of your writing?

A: I get the first draft of novels written in the morning while I'm still in bed, in my pyjamas. I only write for an hour and once that is done I do phone calls, events, all the extra things, but the morning is to get the work done. If I can do 1000 words that's wonderful but I have to do at least 500. For me it's a lovely time and it's a total must, a routine. Once I have started a story I get totally lost in it.

I was a very junior magazine journalist in my teens and you certainly couldn't wait for inspiration, you just had to get on with it, and when my daughter was born I would rush down to the nursery and then would have two hours to write before I collected her.

These days I have become so absolutely obsessed about my early morning writing routine that I'm worried if I take a week off, I won't be able to do it. So I write every day, even Christmas day; I'm superstitious about it.


Q: What else are you writing?

A: I still write contemporary books, too. I have recently delivered a book to my publisher, My Mum Tracy Beaker, and I'm writing another modern novel, but the one after that will be historical.

I wrote the new novel, My Mum Tracy Beaker, because I wondered what she would be like now. In real time, Tracy Beaker would be in her late 30s, so I thought I would find out what had happened to her.

There will also be a short television series based on My Mum Tracy Beaker, because the original Tracy Beaker television series was such a success. If you talk to 20-somethings now, most will have watched it and I hear from people who said it was part of their lives. Now of course the next generation of children are watching Hetty Feather!

 

CLOVER MOON

DOUBLEDAY CHILDREN'S

OCTOBER 2016


Jacqueline Wilson's HETTY FEATHER series launched the bestselling author into new territory, historical fiction, where she explores what life might have been like for less fortunate children in the nineteenth century. Her latest novel, CLOVER MOON, returns to that era but features very different characters.

Clover Moon is raised by her father and stepmother within a large, impoverished family; it is Clover who looks after the children but her rebellious nature is often rewarded with beatings. When the sister she loves dies suddenly, Clover decides to leave her family and to seek shelter in an orphanage run by a children's author in the city. However, she discovers that even here, there are new lessons to be learned.

We asked JACQUELINE WILSON to tell us more about her latest novel.


Q: Why did you decide to return to the Hetty Feather era for your latest novel, but featuring a different character?

A: I'd decided I wanted to have a new Victorian character. Hetty Feather is now about 16, so she's getting older, and I wanted to start off with someone relatively young but, for Hetty Feather fans, to allow her to make a surprise appearance in the book.

I've got very fond of Hetty Feather, she's been lucky for me. There is now a Hetty Feather play and CBBC are just making a third series for it. So I'm not closing the door on Hetty Feather but I felt drawn to writing about a different character.

I'm not planning to write a series of books about Clover Moon but there will be a kind of sequel to Clover Moon, told from the point of view of Rose, a character who Clover meets at the end of the story. Clover will crop up but Rose is the narrator, so we will be able to compare and contrast the lives of the two girls.


Q: What draws you to writing books set in the past?

A: If I wrote Clover Moon as a contemporary story, you find you get into more worrying territory for children. Childhoods were very different in Victorian times and setting stories in the past puts a very different light on child cruelty. We can read about Jane Eyre being locked up in the Red Room and it's worrying and touching but, because it's in the past, we can read it as a story.

By setting this story in the past, I can be quite melodramatic and describe rather a grim life and show how for young girls in the Victorian times, life wasn't a question of how many 'likes' you get if you post a picture on Snapchat; there were real battles to be fought and that gives you scope as a writer.

Plus I now know much more about the Victorian world than I do about today's teenage girls! I'm relatively confident with primary aged children but once they are at secondary school and aged 13 or 14, they go into a bubble of their own. I still get letters from teenagers and I know they worry about the same kinds of things we did like best friends and whether they'll get a boyfriend but there are so many other things going on in their lives, so I prefer to write about children in the past.


Q: Some of the scene-setting and characters in Clover Moon are reminiscent of Dickens; are you a fan?

A: I am although not a dedicated one, I've not read all his work. But I feel there is more scope in this era because people led such extraordinary lives and I like writing about the odd ones out, children or adults. You just seem to expect more odd or extraordinary people at that time.

I also remember reading George Gissing's New Grub Street while I was still writing for magazines during the day and trying to write my novels at night time. I read about all these characters who, like me, were trying to write thousands of words a day and then their novels at night and I thought, here is someone who understands!


Q: Can you tell us more about Clover Moon and how her character developed?

A: I find that once I get a name for my characters, they come alive in my head - although Clover Moon was going to be called a different name, until we found out that someone else was publishing a book with a similar name, so then she became Clover Moon. I liked Clover because I had this idea that her eyes would be green and also for adult eyes, she is an unlucky girl in so many ways and yet she has this lucky name.

I know the sort of girl I want to write about and I wanted Clover to have spirit or she wouldn't survive and I like girls to have a little bit of fire in them. She had to be a strong female character, especially in Victorian times because girls were meant to be quiet and submissive. I also wanted her to be kind and motherly, looking after the little ones, and to be concerned about people who would be tormented by other people for some reason.

Hetty Feather could be kind but because of her background, it's a struggle for her to think about the other children. She survived the Foundling Hospital by thinking of herself as 'Hetty First'. I wanted Clover Moon to be a bit of a contrast in that she is aware of other people and concerned about people who are being tormented for some reason. I also wanted her to have a passion for art.


Q: Clover is encouraged to leave home because of the cruelty she faces from her stepmother, but is there also a sense of sympathy for the stepmother and father?

A: The stepmother is a bit of a monster but I didn't want her to become totally evil or then she'd be more of a caricature. She has taken on a weak husband and is living in poverty with a growing family. She is violent but it's not an everyday occurance; there is one sudden violent outburst where she really loses her temper. There is another scene where she locks Clover in the cupboard and although it's cruel, she is terrified that Clover will pass on a fever to her other children. So she's not a cardboard baddie.


Q: When Clover runs away, she goes to a home for children run by Sarah Smith, a children's author. Is the author based on a real person?

A: I have always been attracted to writings about waifs and strays and one of the most famous Victorian writers of that sort of story was Sarah Smith, but she wrote under the name of Hesba Stretton. She wrote books about street children and did good works and tried to help children. So I thought it would be a lovely idea if she set up this home for street children, which is what happens in Clover Moon.

There were lots of institutions set up by Victorian philanthropists and I wanted one that wasn't as bleak as the Foundling Hospital; it would be kinder to the children and the reasons the children might end up in such a home would vary. In Victorian times they didn't really understand children with learning difficulties or illnesses like epilepsy, only that they were different, so these children were rejected and locked away and we come across some of them at Sarah Smith's home.


Q: Where do you go to research your Victorian settings and the kind of life these children and families would have lived?

A: I'm fascinated by Victorian life and if there was a choice between living upstairs or downstairs, I think I'd have chosen downstairs. It is more interesting and there's more scope for the girls to have a measure of freedom than the children living in upper middle class homes with governesses and nurseries; they would have led a very restrictive life.

As long as children aren't starving, they will play and have fun. I've not read proper Victorian social history books but I love to find Victorian books of the time and to read those, and see the photographs taken then and accounts of people who lived then. There's a resiliance and no matter what the circumstances, there's a black humour, a coping mechanism, in these accounts.


Q: At the home, Clover runs into problems with the other children. Why did you decide to introduce these confrontations?

A: This is a sad truth but, in whatever time you live, children can be lovely to each other and they can also be horrible. Schools try so hard to stop teasing and bullying but I don't think they will ever eradicate children picking on others so in any home, school or orphanage situation, you will get a few children picking on others.

So I write these elements because it adds tension to the plot but it is also comforting to any child being teased to show them that it's never their fault; sometimes these things just happen.


Q: Are you planning to write a series about Clover, as you did with Hetty Feather?

A: I am looking at a kind of sequel to Clover Moon but it will be from a different character's point of view - Rose, who is the daughter of the household where Clover goes to work with the children. Rose will be the narrator so it will compare and contrast their lives but after that, who knows? There may be another story to come.

I've not closed the door on writing another Hetty Feather book, either, so there might be another story about Hetty to come, too, but at the moment I am finishing a World War Two book about evacuees, so it is another book set in the past, in 1939.


Q: We hear you've also written a World Book Day for next year's 20th anniversary in March 2017?

A: Yes, I've revisited a character in The Butterfly Club where there is a scary and unfortunate child called Thelma, who is a bully in The Butterfly Club. I don't think I have ever written from the point of view of a bullying child and I felt so sorry writing about her. That will be called Butterfly Beach and it will be on the of the one pound World Book Day books next year.

At the moment I'm writing two books a year and my family keep asking me, why don't I write just one book a year?, but it seems to be a little compulsive for me to write. The moment I finish one book and decide to have a rest, within two or three days I want to start another one.

I've been writing since I was 17 and had my first job as a junior journalist so I wasn't just writing copy during the day, I was also trying to write my books in the evenings so I do feel very strange when I'm not writing.

 

HETTY FEATHER

DOUBLEDAY

OCTOBER 2009

Author Jacqueline Wilson explains how her first full length historical fiction novel, Hetty Feather, came about. It is Jacqueline Wilson's first full length historical fiction novel.


Jacqueline Wilson says that her appointment as a Foundling Fellow by the Foundling Museum, a sister charity to the Coram society, sparked the first idea for a new story.

She explains, "The Foundling Museum in London is attached to the Coram charity which still works with disadvantaged children. While I ruled out a full length novel, I thought I could write a short story that they might be able to use with children in a worksheet, for example."

The Foundling Hospital was originally established by philanthropist Captain Thomas Coram in 1741. Over the next two centuries it supported 27,000 abandoned children. Today the Coram charity continues to work in supporting disadvantaged children.

Wilson was busy with other projects but, while convalescing from an operation in 2008, she began to think about writing a book that could support the Foundling Museum.

The museum had asked if she could set the story in the Victorian times and Wilson says, "It seemed a sensible period to focus on because of the curriculum links, and I had the idea of a pretty foundling girl who becomes fed up with her lot in life."

The book would be set in the 1870s, a period in which Wilson already had a keen interest. "I love the Victorian age and have lots of books set around that period, Victorian social histories and novels from that period that can provide a lot of extra details." It also meant that she could cover the period around Victoria's Golden Jubilee.

Wilson wanted to make the book as approachable as possible. "I have always tried to make my books as accessible as possible for reluctant readers," she says. "Often historical novels can be quite off putting to them, so I needed to give the novel a Victorian flavour but also to make it an immediate and exciting read.

"It was enormous fun to have something that stretched me a bit but was still in my normal subject matter of single mums and feisty children."

In the novel, Hetty Feather runs away from the strict life in the foundling hospital to try to find out who is her real mother but, while living on the streets of London, she comes to appreciate that in the hospital she is at least fed and educated.

Author's Titles