Links You Might Like

Paint the Town REaD - Australia's community literacy scheme spreading the message "Read, talk, sing and rhyme with your child from Birth to Kindergarten."

VRH – Volunteer Reading Help. This UK literacy charity supports children with their reading through one-to-one mentoring sessions. My time volunteering with them taught me so much about learning and literacy. You can find my writing about them here.

Misrule is the home of Australian children's books online, run by the multi-talented "Swiss Army Knife of Children's Lit", Judith Ridge.

Help2Read - A South African reading support NGO on the VRH model.

Historian Roland Pietsch and I taught together on an outreach programme in East London. Roland's book on "The Real Jim Hawkins" of Treasure Island was published this year - find my interview with him here.

Claire Massey, editor of New Fairy Tales, blogs at The Fairy Tale Cupboard, the go-to resource for all things fable and fairy.

Academic and sometime country-and-western singer Steffen Krüger writes on art history from his Oslo ranch. Read some of his work here.

No Media Kings is the internet home of Jim Munroe, a novelist and indie media pioneer who writes funny, spiky novels for grown-ups. I was a playtester on his award-winning computer game, Everybody Dies.

Insight Guides publish the world’s largest series of visual travel guidebooks and maps. I've written for them about Austria and the city of Salzburg.

Jill Murphy - because The Worst Witch is the coolest book ever.


Philip Pullman's fairytales - including I was a Rat!, Clockwork, The Firework-Maker's Daughter, and The Scarecrow and His Servant - are probably the best children's stories I've ever read. And The Ruby in the Smoke is, for me, a perfect novel. He has wise words to say about schoolteaching, too.

Nnedi Okorafor's Zahrah the Windseeker is another perfect novel in my book - you can see why I think so here. You can find her online at http://nnedi.com/