Marcus Sedgwick

Watch author Marcus Sedgwick discuss genre-bending The Ghosts of Heaven. Hear about why Marcus writes for teens and learn about the ideas and research behind this challenging book. 

A full transcript of this event is available to download below. For shorter clips from this event visit the BBC Scotland Learning(this will open in a new window) website.

If you only do one thing

We know time is tight, so here is just one activity you could do with your class before or after watching the broadcast

Challenging genre LIT 3-02a, LIT 3-07a, LIT 3-09a

In this event Marcus talks about his genre-bending and challenging book The Ghosts of Heaven. The book covers the themes of madness, obsession and creation and spans from the Paleolithic era, witch trials in the 17th century, and insane asylum in the 1920's through to a space ship voyaging into the future. The book blends and challenges the traditional genres of science fiction and historical fiction. What do they think of mixing of genres? Do they like it or not? 

Ask your class to brainstorm as many different genres that they can think of and create a list together. Next, write this list onto a sheet of paper, cut the genre's out and place them in a hat or bag. Go around the class and ask pupils to pick out one genre. They must then work in pairs with their neighbour and come up with a very quick plot (just a sentence or two) or story that blends and mixes the two genres the pair has collected. Allow pupils just a couple of minutes to come up with their idea. Go around the class and ask pupils to share the genre bending stories they have invented. 

For more activities related to this broadcast, pupils could review (this will open in a new window)The Ghosts of Heaven. As the novel contains four different stories pupils could write four reviews, one for each story, or write one review for the book as a whole.

If pupils enjoy the narrative verse sections on The Ghosts of Heaven, we have lots more suggestions of brilliant poetry and narrative verse in our teen poetry book list(this will open in a new window).

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