News & Blog by Christine Bongers
Read the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors. Find out what's being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.
I’m still coming down from the high of last week’s Brisbane launch of Henry Hoey Hobson. Marj Kirkland, National President of the Children’s Book Council of Australia, did the honours at Coaldrake’s Books, in front of a home-town crowd of writers, friends, family and book-lovers. She told the crowd that she had fallen in love with a twelve-year-old boy, and I know how she feels. Books are...
People love to know where we writers get our ideas. They seem to think that ideas are elusive, and that we find them in secret places where others never think to look. The truth is that ideas spring at us from all directions. Like hungry cats, they clamour for a writer’s attention, rubbing up against our legs, jumping onto our laps, and whingeing till they get what they want. Some inevitably...
Confession time …While Henry Hoey Hobson was hitting the bookstore shelves in Australia, I was off sunning myself in Maui. I know. Bad author. Very bad author. I should have been there to pluck HHH’s straight little spine from the bookstore shelves and rearrange them so that his cover faced outwards (like all good authors do). Instead I deserted him…The moment that fragrant, frangipani-strewn...
As a kid, I loved reading Zane Grey westerns and Jack London adventures. I’d ride horses bareback and fight boys with sticks, then retire to my room with my uber-Barbie (the one with the swivel waist and the bendable knees). I devoured Jane Eyre, Ann of Green Gables and Little Women with the same avid obsession as Reach for the Sky, the true story of Douglas Bader, the legless World War II fighter...
When I first heard the name ‘Henry Hoey Hobson’, it hooked me like lawyer vine. With no copyright on names, I knew that somehow, somewhere, I had to use it in a novel. For me, the combination of those three ordinary little words lifted them out of the commonplace. They resonated instantly, but I had to wait years before I found the right fictional character to fit the moniker. That character,...
