Summer of success for local author

1:23pm Thursday 21st August 2008

IT’S been an exciting summer for Herefordshire author Anne Cottringer as her most recent children’s book, her twelfth, became one of THE children’s books of the summer.

Eliot Jones, Midnight Superhero, was chosen for the Reading Agency’s summer reading challenge and selected by The Sunday Times for its summer holiday reading selection, saying: “Eliot Jones has unusual wit and liveliness. Eliot is a quiet little boy by day, but when the clock strikes midnight he becomes an expert lion tamer, champion swimmer, sleuth, skill jet pilot, experienced mountaineer... When he saves the world, ‘the earth trembles with deafening applause’. Alex T Smith’s illustrations make the pages a richly patterned, comic, action-packed mix of cartoon and collage. Huge fun.”

But it’s not just Eliot Jones who’s made the grade – Anne learned earlier this month that her first novel, Singing It, had been shortlisted for the YoungMinds Book Award.

Singing It is the tale of a talented singer, a defiant loner because of incessant travelling, who learns the confidence to sing in public and trust in friends.

Anne, who was brought up in Canada, close to Niagara Falls, had her first book published in 1996, having always wanted to write but never having had the time.

Until the arrival of her children in the early 1990s, Anne had worked as a camerawoman, director and producer of film, video and TV, directing for the BBC and Channel 4.

But when she took time out from her job, she began to think she’d better do something and started writing.

“I have always wanted to write but never had time or the discipline, so when I had my children I had time in a different kind of way than I’d ever had before,” she explains.

“I had a fantasy about writing books with children playing at my feet, but I was soon relieved of that one.”

Joining a creative writing class provided the catalyst that would see her published. “Joining the class meant that I engaged with writing rather than it simply being a wish,” she recalls. “I felt it was possible, once I could see other people doing it.”

Anne continues to run two careers in tandem, with her life behind the camera providing balance: “It takes me out of the solitary existence that writing is. And editors and agents have always accepted that I do both”.

Having made films about the genocide in Rwanda and documentaries for Al Jazeera, it is clear that balance and contrast are key elements of Anne’s parallel careers. “I like that variety,” she said.

Eliot Jones, Midnight Superhero is published by Scholastic Publications; Singing It is published by Andersen Press.