K.M. Grant

Email:

katiegrant@btinternet.com

Website:

http://kmgrant.org/

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, and was one of Michigan's chosen Authors in April. She is also a working journalist and has, until very recently, done all her work in the meatsafe of her old Victorian house. There was no heating in the room, which speeded up the writing process no end. She has just been appointed the Royal Literary Fund Fellow to the University of Glasgow.

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 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 have done some work at the Roald Dahl Museum, showing children how to create characters and make stories come alive. I look at difficult times in history, and like to show both sides of story, for example, Will, a Christian, and Kamil, a Muslim, are both heroes in the de Granville trilogy. It's fun to incorporate real historical characters, too. In Belle's Song, we meet Chaucer, not as the writer we all know, but in his less familiar role as a spy. I also alert people to the magnificent King PingDingDing and his wife Onaratacatafatalatatudenarian and can, on request, 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