Printz Award for Kits Wilderness, which has also been named best book of the year by School Library Journal, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly. By looking back into the past, by re-imagining it and blending it with what I see around me now, I found a way to move forward and to become something that I am intensely happy to be: a writer for children.”ĭavid Almond is the winner of the 2001 Michael L. These books are suffused with the landscape and spirit of my own childhood. By the time Skellig came out, Id written my next childrens novel, Kits Wilderness. It took six months, was rapidly taken by Hodder Childrens Books and has changed my life.

Skellig, my first childrens novel, came out of the blue, as if it had been waiting a long time to be told. I disliked school and loved the library, a little square building in which I dreamed that books with my name on them would stand one day on the shelves. I scribbled stories and stitched them into little books. I trembled at the images presented to us in church, at the awful threats and glorious promises made by black-clad priests with Irish voices. I sat with my grandfather in his allotment, held tiny Easter chicks in my hands while he smoked his pipe and the factory sirens wailed and larks yelled high above. We promised never-ending friendship and whispered of the amazing journeys wed take together. We scared each other with ghost stories told in fragile tents on dark nights. I ran with my friends through the open spaces and the narrow lanes.

I listened to the gossip that filled Dragones coffee shop. I listened to the stories and songs at family parties. “I grew up in a big extended Catholic family.

David almond first book