Laura Cowan
About Author
Laura studied literature at Cambridge and more literature at Trinity College Dublin. This means she's read a lot of books, which helps when writing them. Before joining Usborne, she taught English in Barcelona for four years, as well as in Dublin and Cambridge. She now lives in East London with some plants and a lot of vintage clothes.
Interview
THE USBORNE BOOK OF THE MOON
USBORNE BOOKS
JUNE 2019
As we celebrate the anniversary of the first landing on the Moon, THE USBORNE BOOK OF THE MOON helps younger children aged 7+ discover more about the Moon - from the first legends humans created about the Moon thousands of years ago, to facts about the Moon, space travel and the achievements of that first landing on the Moon.
We asked author LAURA COWAN to tell us more about THE USBORNE BOOK OF THE MOON:
Q: Can you tell us a little about how you started writing non-fiction books for children? What kinds of subjects did you enjoy reading about as a child?
A: After university, I taught English abroad and had been doing bits and pieces of writing at the same time. When I moved back to the UK, I wanted to do it properly and luckily I got a job writing children's books at Usborne!
I have always been a big reader. My mum is a teacher so she taught me to read very early. As a child I read a lot of fiction and especially liked fantasy books like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Worst Witch series, and Diana Wynne Jones.
Q: Why were you excited about creating this book about the Moon for children?
A: I am always excited to learn new things! My knowledge of space was mostly from science fiction, so first I went to some astronomy lectures at the Royal Observatory to find out more. Then I was excited thinking about all the different paths into the story of the Moon - science, history, mythology and more from all over the world.
Q: How did you decide to approach the subject, for example the questions children ask about the moon?
I wanted to create a narrative as much as possible. Stories are important! They help us understand things.
Q: It's great to find out about the mythology that has developed around the moon - where did you discover all these stories?
A: I used the LaRousse New Encyclopaedia of Mythology, which is a very lovely big old book from the 1930s, originally published in French. It is very dense, but luckily there is an index so I could find all the moon stories quickly!
Q: Where else did you research your facts about the moon, and was there anything you discovered that surprised you?
A: I did a lot of internet research. NASA unsurprisingly has a lot of information about the Apollo Mission online! I was surprised how many missions failed during the Space Race and how in many ways it's just luck that Apollo 11 was successful and not a Russian mission. And even though Apollo 11 was a success, it so easily might not have been.
The spacecraft in the Space Race seem very fragile to modern eyes - it's hard to believe they travelled that far and came back again. There didn't seem to be a lot separating the astronauts and cosmonauts from the space outside!
Q: Was there anything about the science of the moon that was particularly challenging to present in this book?
A: Explaining the phases of the moon in a very small space was quite complicated. There were also things I wanted to go into more detail about and couldn't. Some things were too hard and the amount of space needed wasn't really worth it, especially for things that are very interesting in their own right but only tangentially related to the Moon... such as astrolabes!
I wanted to write about the theory of the Moon's creation, but it's hard to visualise and it would have taken up too many pages. I saw it explained in a pop-up book recently and thought 'ah, so you need to explain it three dimensionally!'.
Q: What do you think about the illustrations by Diana Toledano and were you involved at all in the layout of the book?
A: I think they're absolutely beautiful! I'm particularly a fan of all the beautiful textures Diana creates. The layouts were created by Zoe Wray an amazing designer at Usborne. We worked very closely from the beginning and once I'd worked out the content of the book we talked a lot about how we envisioned the layout of each page. It is important for us that the text and images work together.
Q: What would you like children to learn from reading your book?
A: I hope they learn there are lots of different ways to think about one thing. And that anything worth doing takes a lot of time and work. But the most important thing is to try.
Q: What do you hope could be our next chapter in our history with the Moon?
A: I hope it's something collaborative and wonderful that shows humanity at its best - lots of countries working together to create something amazing. I hope it isn't just huge companies mining the Moon for its resources or making adverts on the Moon. That's depressing.
Q: Do you have other books planned on similar themes? What are you writing now?
A: Potentially! But right now I am writing about genes and DNA, which is absolutely fascinating and is making me want to become a geneticist! Although I wanted to be an astronaut while I was writing about the Moon, so...
Q: What do you feel are the most exciting areas to read about in non fiction today?
A: I like interdisciplinary approaches where one subject can be examined in lots of different ways - scientifically, historically, etc. Having said that, I have books about 20th-century history and one about class and social mobility to read on holiday.
The Usborne Book of the Moon
