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There’s A Yeti In The Playground Pamela Butchart, illustrated by Thomas Flintham, Nosy Crow, £6.99
AWARD-WINNING children’s author Pamela Butchart cuddles her first baby and beams a warm smile.
The Dundee teacher is currently on maternity leave. But if she thought she was in for some down-time with cherished nine-month-old Albie she was mistaken.
She wrote her newly-published book There’s a Yeti in the Playground, the eighth in the hugely popular Izzy series, during Albie’s 20-minute naps, having already penned her £1 World Book Day offering, The Baby Brother From Out Of Space, in pregnancy.
The writer, who won the Blue Peter Book Award for The Spy Who Loved School Dinners, was thrilled to be selected as a WBD author alongside celebrities including McFly’s Tom Fletcher and Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain.
It plunged the 36-year-old, her teacher husband Andy Cunningham and their baby into a hectic UK tour which took them to the Scottish Parliament to meet Nicola Sturgeon and to 10 Downing Street.
Pamela, who lives in Broughty Ferry, tells iN10: “My first book was published in 2014. There’s A Yeti In The Playground is my 20th in total. In that time I also got married and had a baby. It has been bonkers.
“I wrote the Yeti story entirely during Albie’s morning nap time.
“It’s all been quite an experience for Albie. At eight weeks old his first trip out of Dundee was to the Blue Peter studios followed by the World Book Day tour.”
It was while en route to London by train via Edinburgh and the Scottish Parliament that she came up with the idea for the story. She had planned to visit a school with the First Minister but it was closed because of the snow. Transport was also hit.
Pamela says: “We were stuck on a train for 10 hours between Edinburgh and London. All you heard that weekend was ‘The Beast from the East’. I said to Andy that if I was eight years old I’d take that literally and be terrified that there was a yeti coming here. That’s when I came up with the idea for the book.”
Pamela, a philosophy teacher at Dundee’s Harris Academy, confesses she owes her writing career to her husband, its depute head, and their cats Bear and Carlos.
The former St Vincent’s primary and St Saviour’s High School pupil reveals: “I have always loved children’s books – especially picture books. I have a wild imagination and have always made up stories orally. But I never thought about writing my own until my husband gave me a token little present from our cats on my 28th birthday.
“It was titled How To Write For Children. When I opened it, the first thing I felt was disappointment, not because I wanted an iPad but because I thought I wouldn’t be able to do it.
“I thought being a children’s author was something that other people did; people who didn’t live in Dundee and lived down in London and were very fancy and much smarter that I am.
“But that very night, October 10th 2010, when Andy and the cats were sleeping I started to have a wee read of it. I got to page 11 and I thought, ‘You know what, I think I can do this’. The book just gave me that bit of confidence.”
Pamela a former student of both Dundee and Edinburgh universities, recalls: “I started going to Dundee University Library and sat in the same seat I was in when I was a student and I just kept writing and writing and writing.”
She turned out what she describes as “11 terrible picture books” before signing-up for the Winchester Literary Festival and competition. It led to her landing an agent and a four-book deal with Bloomsbury Publishing. The rest is history.
Pamela is excited as she looks to the future. She has penned two new Secret Seven books at the request of The Enid Blyton Estate.
The first, Mystery Of The Skull, was published in July and the second, Mystery of the Theatre Ghost is out in January.
She says: “I was scared because people feel so strongly about these books. I knew some people wouldn’t like it but I just had to get over that.
“I had to remember that I was writing for children. I had a chat with the Enid Blyton Estate and said I wanted to keep the stories in the past with the same characters but I wanted to add a lot more girl power.
“And I wanted the language to be a bit more modern in places – but not excessively so.
“So there’s ‘loads and loads’ of lemonade instead of ‘lashings.’
“I hope I have kept the magic that Enid Blyton created.”