K.M. Grant

Email:

katiegrant@btinternet.com

Author type:

Writer

BRAW network:

yes

LL funded:

yes

Biography:

Katie Grant likes to incorporate high adventure, suspense, divided loyalties and romance as well as her own family history into her books. Though she believes it important to be faithful to the times about which she writes, she also understands that to grip young readers you must go about your craft as a housebuilder does, with history the foundation and scaffolding but the main interest lying with the characters. An author since 2004, she has already had 2 US booktours with another in the offing. She is also a working journalist. Married with three children, two dogs and two budgies, she works in what used to be the meatsafe of their old Victorian house. There is no heating in the room, which speeds up the writing process no end.

About writer's work:

I automatically gravitate to history because my own family history incorporates all the best things about the past: blood and guts (executions and suchlike); peculiarities (an ancestor whose head ended up in a hatbox, see How The Hangman Lost His Heart); odd interests (one ancestor collected marbles - Roman busts and armless Greek beauties, mostly now in the British Museum - another invented the rain gauge) and spookiness (ancestral boggarts on bridges). History is deadly serious, but also a good deal of fun and I'm always fascinated by our notion that we're so much more civilised than our antecedents when, in truth, we often seem to have progressed hardly at all.

About writer's events and projects:

I do events and workshops on the theme Putting the Story Back into History and did some work at the Roald Dahl Museum on creating characters and how to make stories come alive. I take the bull by the horns and look at difficult times in history, for example the crusades during which the de Granville trilogy is set, as well as less difficult times. I also alert people to the magnificent King PingDingDing and his wife Onaratacatafatalatatudenarian and sing a sad song about a hippopotamus.

Links to other websites:

www.puffin.co.uk

www.walkeryoungreaders.com

Language:

English

Age groups:

9-12, Teens

Local authorities available to visit:

Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Angus, Argyll and Bute, Clackmannanshire, Dumfries and Galloway, Dundee, East Ayrshire, East Dunbartonshire, East Lothian, East Renfrewshire, Edinburgh, Falkirk, Fife, Glasgow, Highland, Inverclyde, Midlothian, Moray, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (Western Isles), North Ayrshire, North Lanarkshire, Orkney, Perth and Kinross, Renfrewshire, Scottish Borders, Shetland, South Ayrshire, South Lanarkshire, Stirling, West Dunbartonshire, West Lothian