Georgia Byng
About Author
Georgia Byng grew up outside Winchester, near the river Itchen with her
three brothers and a sister. Whilst her brothers terrorised the neighbourhood throwing eggs and planting pretend bombs on people's doorsteps, Georgia made friends with everyone. Really, this was a ploy to get into people's houses to see how they ticked. Also it was a good way to get tasty things to eat.
Georgia's interest in local characters ran parallel with a love of acting and performing. She and her sister would put on plays and sometimes invite the neighbours - as long as they paid. The money always sent to The Red Cross, although a small wage was usually set aside for the sisters. Enough for a couple of bags of sweets.
Through her school years, first a local school, then a boarding school and finally at a sixth form college, Georgia's interest in theatre grew. At eighteen, she got into The Central School of Speech and Drama. This was a great place. In the first term everyone went to the zoo a lot and studied the animals, giving animal performances to the rest of the class. Then, after that, the students studied people. After three years of tap dancing, singing and pretending to be other people, Georgia left.
She got her Equity card entertaining children with puppets. Although she had quite a fancy agent, and although she went to many auditions and got tantalizingly close to winning some parts, not many good acting jobs came her way. A serial called 'Capsticks Law' was the most solid chunk of work that she got. And quite a few student movies that she did, now lurk in the bottoms of video cupboards here and there. So, tired of waiting for the telephone to ring, and inbetween waitressing, Georgia had the time to concentrate on painting and writing. She had always drawn and painted and she had always written songs and poems, but she had never tried stories.
The painting and drawing and writing soon merged into one and Georgia found herself writing and illustrating comic strip stories. That was eleven years ago. It took five years though before she managed to find her first publisher. The Sock Monsters published by Orion in 1995 was her first published book - a comic strip story for 5 - 7 year olds. A picture book and two more young novels followed.
Georgia has written all sorts of other books - fat, thin, old, young, funny, serious, good, bad and ugly. Macmillan have to date published her book, Molly Moon's Incredible Book Of Hypnotism in May 2002 with the paperback following in May 2003 and Molly Moon Stops the World in September 2003 with the paperback in May 2004. Georgia's latest book, the third in the fabulous Molly Moon series, Molly Moon's Hypnotic Time Travel Adventure is due to publish in October 2005. Molly Moon's Incredible Book Of Hypnotism has won the 10-11 year old category of the Nottingham Children's Book Award 2004 and also not only won her category at the Sheffield Children's Book Award 2003 but was the overall winner. Georgia is over the moon about it all.
She lives in a very messy house in London with two untidy people -
her daughter Tiger, who loves making things and her partner Marc
Quinn who is an artist. He keeps all sorts of nasty things in the fridge
- once he had to keep a Canadian frog in there, which was hibernating
and had to be kept cold. Their young son Lucas is the latest addition to the
family. He likes painting with his porridge, but Georgia still hopes he will
grow up to be tidy like her. The whole family loves watching films and
reading.
Interview
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