Award winning author Horatio Clare joins our author calendar!
Horatio Clare’s first book for children, Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot, won the Branford Boase Award 2016. His previous works include Running for the Hills, an acclaimed account of a Welsh childhood, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and saw Horatio shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. Other books include Truant, A Single Swallow (shortlisted for the Dolman Travel Book of the Year), The Prince’s Pen and most recently the best-selling travelogue, Down to the Sea in Ships(winner of the Dolman Travel Book of the Year). His essays and reviews appear regularly in the national press and on BBC radio.
Name three things on your Christmas list this year! Hope, joy and patience…
Christmas is a time of family traditions – what are your best (or worst!) family traditions? Carol singing in the square, normally in sleet. Eating pheasant on
Christmas eve. Missing the days of great films on Christmas afternoon. Watching hours of television.
What is your favourite story to read at Christmas? A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas is wonderful.
If you could have Christmas dinner with anyone (alive today or person from history) who would it be? William Shakespeare is the person I would most like to meet. I believe he was very good company, laughed a lot, and was the greatest listener and observer of all time. It was be great fun to see what he made of a modern Christmas.
Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot features a wonderful cast of characters from Aubrey himself to a talking bluebottle! If you could describe the perfect cast for a festive story who would it include? You need a heroine: I think an extremely wild girl who had definitely not been good and was told she was not on Santa’s good children list would make an interesting lead character. And you need a villain. Donald Trump? There should be a buzzard with vertigo, a pirate with seasickness and an escaped prisoner, incarcerated for a crime he did not commit.
You explore the very real and difficult issue of depression in Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot and yet the book is full of compassion and hope. What would you say to encourage someone suffering from depression particularly at a time when everyone is ‘supposed’ to be feeling jolly and festive? Loss of perspective is a killer. Depression tells you it’s all about you, it’s all your fault, and that you make people unhappy. All of this is untrue. If you can get up, say yes to everything and forget yourself, even for a minute, through involvement with other people, this is good. Kindness to oneself and forgiveness of oneself make a great difference. Service to others, just the smallest thing, helps you to forget yourself. Some of the happiest people at Christmas work for others – a friend of mine used to volunteer at a crisis centre. It was a genuine public service and it made her a great, giving person to be around. Conversation is a huge help – the Samaritans are busy at Christmas, for good reason. It is a sign of strength and recovery to search for people to talk to: you do not have to wait until you are in a desperate place to call them. They would much rather just speak to someone who needs a good listener who will not make judgements. Also, no one should feel bad about going to bed with a book or the remote and staying there. Sometimes it is a waiting game – depression does end, that’s the secret, and sometimes you just have to be kind to yourself, and let the light in. Doing things you don’t feel like -going for walks in vile weather, meeting people when you don’t think you are up to it – always brings unexpected reward, and relief.
(This is really heartfelt and heart warming – and full of hope).
Reader’s question from the children at the Inkpots Writers’ Hut; we are often told persevering as a writer is really important. How many rejection letters did you get before you were published? It’s part of the game, as it is in all creative jobs. Ask an actor how many roles they auditioned for that they did not get! It is much worse for actors because they need someone else’s permission to practice their art. Writers can just get on with it. First I was rejected by an agent, on the strength of a bad manuscript. Then I found an agent, who sent it out, and the same bad manuscript, slightly improved, was rejected by about ten publishers. But the 11th met me and said this thing is rubbish, but you are a writer. Why don’t you write something that people will need and want to read? So by the time I had the first chapters of my next book ready that publisher had been sacked and his imprint shut down. But those chapters went on to become my first book. But when you are starting out you don’t need to worry about any of that. Write a lot, write for pleasure, write for joy, write when you are feeling thoughtful and write when your heart is full. At some point you will start writing for the story itself, for the readers it deserves, and that is when you cross over from wanting to be a writer to actually being one.
(Brilliant advice- thank you)
Turkey or goose? Goose! Turkeys deserve a break, and geese have it all their own way
most of the time.
Real or fake tree? Real! You need that smell of pine needles. And there is too much plastic in the world.
Mince pies or Christmas pudding? Mince pies! Christmas pudding is more like a weapon than a foodstuff.
Stockings – end of the bed or over the fireplace? Over the fireplace. No one needs to wake up to find a man with a beard getting tangled up at the end of the bed.
(Hilarious *laughs out loud*!!)
Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve? Christmas Eve! Flying reindeer are so much more fun than hurtling police cars…
Thank you for participating in our author advent and have a very Happy Christmas!
Find out more about Horatio at www.firefly.co.uk and follow Horatio on Twitter @HoratioClare
myself. Hopefully that will limit me to one box only. A signed print by Chris Riddell – no one in my family would ever have thought of buying me this, so I have cheated and bought it myself. It’s currently at the framers. ‘Set the Boy Free’ Johnny Marr’s autobiography. Johnny was the guitarist with The Smiths – my favourite band of all time so I can’t wait to read this.
two lines send shivers of excitement down my spine, its a very magical Christmas story. Or possibly Agatha Christie’s The Adventure of The Christmas Pudding. I’d like to have a go at illustrating a longer text and I think a collection of murderous texts by one of my favourites could be a good place to start!
Reader’s question from students at Warden Park Academy; when you are creating a story do you draw it or write it first? My stories tend to start with a character. I think that’s my favourite part of my job, the thinking up characters part! Once I have sketched out my character, from all angles and doing different things, their personality starts to shape. Then a story will develop from their character or I will remember a story I have scribbled down in one of my notebooks that would suit them (then I have to find it!!! Not easy when you have a least a million notebooks!). Once I know who and what the story is about then I start to write. Then re write. Then edit. Then re write again. Then think the whole idea is rubbish, at which point I show it to someone else as I can’t see the wood for the trees. Then re write it all over again. Once I am happy with the words I sketch out each page VERY roughly. Then re sketch it, etc etc. And FINALLY when I am happy with the sketches I get cracking on the illustrations.
d English Literature at Aberystwyth and trained as a Drama & English teacher. She wrote her first novel during her first few years in teaching, securing a publishing deal with Bloomsbury who published her first four books. Rhian’s fifth book, The Boy who Drew the Future has been nominated for the Carnegie Medal 2017. She is a National Trust writer in residence at Sudbury Hall and the Museum of Childhood. She currently lives in Rutland, the smallest county in the country, with her family and their two very lively spaniels.
So I’m going to say “Three good children” just to annoy my three little angels. I’d also like snow, lots of it. Deep enough to build a snowman and have a decent snowball fight. And maybe build an igloo. And then…let’s not pretend I haven’t got a book wish list but if I had to pick just one title it would probably be To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey. I adored her first novel, The Snow Child and I’m guessing this next one will be equally wonderful.
Thomas with those gorgeous illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. I hear those opening lines and feel like Christmas is about to properly start. “…I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.” Magic.
In The Boy who Drew the Future you brilliantly connect two characters that live hundreds of years apart. How do you think a child from the 1800s would react to the way we celebrate Christmas in 2016? Why thank you. Honestly? I think they’d be horrified as I am when I force myself to go a shopping centre from October onwards. *shivers as the prospect of Christmas shopping*. The best part of Christmas last year for me was all the village gathered on the green to sing carols by candlelight and lanterns. My 5 year old was bored senseless but I was transported, probably back to the 1800s.
Reader’s question from children at the 
thebookactivist 