Simon Puttock

I was born in New Zealand and dragged up all over the place. In the summer of 2004 I moved from Newcastle Upon Tyne to Edinburgh, and I am very glad that I did! When I was a child I lived by the (warm, Caribbean) sea, and I would like to live by the (any old) sea again. A mixture of sand and shingle beach is best, I think. In an ideal world, I would live at least part of every year underwater, although, strangely, some of my favourite things in the world are cacti, which generally seem to live in deserts or on my window sill. I read incessantly, and sometimes I paint. Then again, I am a silversmith of sorts… and I used to be a DJ, and before that I was in a band. We even performed on the fringe of the Fringe of the Edinburgh Festival once. (I never meant to be a DJ, it just happened to me and stuck for 14 years.) I am very good at worrying, but most of my friends do not see this as a particularly great talent. Let’s face it, it exasperates them. As for the rest, well it’s probably a lot less interesting to anyone else than it is me (and is that a terrible sentence?) but I will just add that very recently I went up in a glider for the first time and looped the loop twice – it was utterly fantastic. P.S You can probably tell from this that my mind won’t work in straight lines for any decent amount of time. I have also been a judge for the Whitbread Children's Award and the Kathleen Fidler Award, and a guest lecturer in picture books at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.