Campaigning Author

Linda Newbery, 71, writes fiction for all age groups and has been shortlisted for many prizes. Her young adult novel Set in Stone won the Costa Children’s Book Prize in 2007. She chats to Susan Elkin.

LI would write the first draft in the six-week summer break. Goodness knows, looking back how I did it because that’s a very short time for a first draft

inda Newbery was eight years old when she decided that she wanted to be a writer. “So, I wrote a lot – usually in secret because they told me at school that writing wasn’t a proper job” she says. “I was inspired by the books I loved. There was an abridged version of Black Beauty which I knew almost by heart, and I was very fond of Bambi by Felix Salten – I have never seen the film.”

This neatly introduces the theme of animals and their welfare, which has been threaded through Linda’s work all her life and is very important to her. One of her most recent books (2021) – unusually not fiction – is Cruelty Free, which is about how our everyday choices affect animals and the environment.

“At the beginning I had aspirations to be a poet” says Linda, adding selfdeprecatingly that most of her early efforts were pretty awful although poems creep into some of her novels. “It’s odd. I write all my prose work straight onto the computer but, for some inexplicable reason, I can’t do that with poetry. It has to be old fashioned pen and paper.”

Linda grew up in Essex where she attended grammar school before heading to university for an English degree and life as a secondary English teacher in Oxfordshire, where she still lives.

“My generation grew up without teenage or young adult fiction, but when I encountered the early pioneers such as KM Peyton, Aidan Chambers and Robert Westall during my teacher training – and given the everyday contact with teenagers at school every day – I wanted to try it myself.” The result was Linda’s first book Run With the Hare (1988), published as an Armada paper back. “It’s about a sixth form girl who starts an animal rights group and was inspired by Black Beauty” says Linda, telling me that she wrote this and two further published novels without having an agent. “I just wrote them and sent them off” she says, simply.

I wonder how her students at school felt about being taught by a published author. “Well, I didn’t make a big thing of it but, with a colleague, I

That gave me a new lease of life. Suddenly people were beginning to take a bit more notice. There were reviews in the national press and book prizes

did run some two-day residential writing workshops for Years 8 and 9.” Soon Linda was writing a young adult novel a year for Harper Collins (of which Armada was an imprint). “I would write the first draft in the six-week summer break. Goodness knows, looking back how I did it because that’s a very short time for a first draft.”

At this point I ask Linda about her personal life. She is married – and her husband cheerfully pops in to offer her coffee during our telephone conversation – but has no children, so at least she wasn’t having to juggle childcare along with teaching and writing.

Then Linda felt the urge to add “chapter books” for younger children to her repertoire. “I was very lucky because by then, I was running the school library and Oxford School Library Service was on the same site as the school I was teaching in. So I could pop across and look at books there in my free periods” she says, adding ruefully that “Of course OSLS is not there now”. Barney the Boat Dog and The Marmalade Pony were among the titles she wrote at that time.

But there was a gap. What about books for middle grade readers, the eight to twelves? “Blitz Boys was published by AMC Black, who invited me to do it and I went on to write four more Second World War titles for that age group. By then I had cut my teaching down to part-time partly because I was also fitting in school visits.” Five Key Stage 2/3 books for Orion followed, including At the Firefly Gate. And there was an interesting project with Usborne. “Two other novelists, Adele Geras and Ann Turnbull, and I were each asked to write a story set in the same historic house at a different time. So, we decided that the house would be in Chelsea Walk, swapped outlines, agreed floor plans and negotiated some character overlap. Mine was called Polly’s March (2004) and was about votes for women. Adele’s was set in Victorian times. Another was set in WW2. There were eventually six titles. It was great fun to do.” In 2000 Linda finally gave up teaching and, at about the same time, was taken on by David Fickling which was then an imprint of Random House. “That gave me a new lease of life” she says. “Suddenly people were beginning to take a bit more notice. There were reviews in the national press and book prizes. I suppose the marketing was more efficient. “My book The Shell House was published in 2001 – shortlisted for Guardian Fiction Prize and the Carnegie Medal. It was quite brave of them to run with it really because, set in World War One it includes homosexuality and Clause 28 was still in place.”

Sisterland was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal a year later and I ask Linda how much effect that recognition has on sales. “It brings a small increase at the beginning but, if the book is still only available in hard back, there are cost implications for schools taking part in the shadowing scheme” she says, adding that the Carnegie Shadowing Scheme and school visits have brought her some mixed experiences. “But I’m often humbled by thoughtful and very perceptive responses.”

Linda has also written adult fiction and would like to do more. Her Quarter

Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (2014), commissioned by David Fickling, was chosen for the Radio 2 Book Club and got her an interview with Simon Mayo. The paperback edition was renamed

Linda didn’t care for. “I’m working hard on reviving my adult fiction now” she says. “I’ve had an agent for the rest of my work for many years but not for adult fiction, so I’m taking charge myself.”

Otherwise Linda’s current project is another Green Man story (to add to Lob and The Brockenspectre – both beautifully illustrated by Pam Smy) for David Fickling, who has long since left Random House and set up independently. “There is something very special about the 7-plus age group” she says, agreeing with me that this stage in a child’s life is vital for developing the sort of in-depth reading which then permanently enhances every other part of life.

The publishing industry is very volatile, and Linda has several times fallen victim to mergers, takeovers, the disappearance of imprints and books falling through cracks. I understand this very well since the same thing has happened to me three times and it can be very frustrating. Nonetheless she’s very positive and busy. “I don’t have a so-many-hours-per-day writing routine” she says, but I do think it’s essential to write every day. That way you keep the project alive in your head and often work at it while you’re doing something else such as going for a walk. If you leave it for a few days you lose that continuity.”

The age range Linda writes for is so wide that I wonder how she adapts. “In a strange way the story tells you what it wants to be and I hope that doesn’t sound too fey?” reflects Linda. “You think about the story and some element there tells you how to pitch it. It’s to do with mindset, I think.”

Linda has been a vegetarian all her adult life and campaigns actively via social media for better animal welfare. And, with two other authors, Celia Rees and

Adele Geras, she runs a lively website called Reviews by Writers, whch reviews and promotes books and discusses – in a very accessible way – bookish issues. www.lindanewbery.co.uk @lindanewbery www.reviewsbywriters.blogspot.com @writersreviews1