Horrible Histories: Author Terry Deary on being 'a fish out of water'
Terry Deary and illustrator Martin Brown launched the Horrible Histories books in 1993"The problem with non-fiction books is they're written by experts who wouldn't know a child if it jumped up and bit them on the kneecap," he says.
"Who goes to literary festivals? They are attended by parents whose children enjoy books. My target is children whoread books. The sort of kids I grew up with. Going to a literary festival isn't going to reachWhich raises the question of how to break that cycle and capture that audience."Through television. Cinema. Going to heritage sites," replies Deary."Book clubs where they go around schools and sell books, and the children go and look at them and are given tokens.
"I only know one northern children's writer now," he says - singling out Skellig author David Almond. "In the TV series, the director said, 'we can't do the Holocaust'. But I did in the books. And so the books can still do things that television can't because of sensitivities. I understand that, but I don't know the rules [of TV]. In theatre, I've done so many plays down the years I know what I can get away with.
A great deal has changed in publishing since 1993 - the year Deary's first Horrible Histories book came out.the publishing industry was"going down like the Titanic" because it wasn't adapting quickly enough to changing consumer habits. Eight years on, he's embracing technology more strongly than ever.
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