SPECIAL GUEST NORTHERN HIGHLIGHT MAISIE PARADISE SHEARRING (MPS) AND NESS WOOD (NW) ORANGE BEAK STUDIO Why did you want to work in the book industry?  I have always loved books and I always wanted to be a designer, even though I thought that was someone who created record covers. From studying Graphic Design at college, I got an interview at Collins Publishers (as it was then). I was very excited. I told the small agency I was working for that my auntie was very ill so they would give me the day off and I would get paid for it... I didn’t have an unwell auntie in London! I got the job. NW  I was very fortunate to be brought up in a home filled with books. My mum is devoted to reading, and passionate about stories, and she passed on that love of books to me. I loved drawing when I was growing up, but I never considered being an illustrator as I had never really thought of it as a job. When I was studying on my art foundation at Hull College, my tutors encouraged me to apply to ...

NORTHERN HIGHLIGHT SUSANNAH LLOYD Why did you become a writer?   I have always loved children’s books. I’ve so many happy memories of being read to as a child by my parents and teachers, and they were such good books too, like Trubloff , The Mouse Who Wanted To Play The Balalaika , Mr Rabbit and The Lovely Present , and Burglar Bill . I have collected them all again, read them to my own children and I think I've developed an almost religious reverence for them! I used to write stories all the time when I was a child, and I still have some of my first attempts at picture books, made with felt tips and wonky stapled bits of paper on my kitchen table when I was five. But when I was around twelve or thirteen I made the terrible error of giving up on this dream. I thought ‘real’ writers would feel that writing was incredibly fluid and easy, would never write anything disastrous on a first draft, and would never have had hundreds of red spelling corrections scrawled all...

NORTHERN HIGHLIGHT Tania Willis,  Helen Stephens & Katie Chappell THE GOOD SHIP ILLUSTRATION This week, Helen Stephens, author of the How to Hide a Lion series, and many more books for children, is talking to us about The Good Ship Illustration and their online courses for illustrators and image-makers navigating a creative career. Can you tell us about The Good Ship Illustration and how it was founded? Tania, Katie and I all live in the same small coastal town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. I moved here about 10 years ago in search of more space after 17 years in London. Katie was born here, and after travelling the world, nannying on the way, she came back to do her MA in Edinburgh and stayed. And Tania, who was my tutor at Glasgow School of Art, moved here after living and working in Hong Kong for twenty years. She saw a picture I posted of some washing hanging in one of the back lanes and wanted to know where this picture of northern domestic idyll could be!    We woul...

NORTHERN HIGHLIGHT LOUISE LAMONT Why did you want to work in the book industry? I very much liked the idea of being paid to share my thoughts about books, a thing I had been doing for free since I was about 6. Tell us about where you live. Like many people, I felt I had to be in London to work in publishing, and so I moved there after graduation. But over the last few years, I came to realise that that wasn't really true - and in some respects, no longer feasible long-term. So in 2018, I asked my bosses at LBA Books - a literary agency based next to the British Museum - whether I could carry on working for them in exactly the same capacity, but just 334 miles away in Scotland. We have the internet now, after all. Quickest to say yes was the colleague whose snack drawer I pilfered on a daily basis, even after she replaced all the good stuff with those dry-as-dust nature bars - but the rest of the team also agreed to give my proposal a go. Perhaps they too feared...