Reading Ladder Level 2: Friday Surprise Award-winning author by Anne Fine (author) and Helen Flook (illustrator)

More about Anne: “When I was young, it never occurred to me that I might be a writer. I think I must have thought that books were born on the library shelves. But I was good at writing stories, and I had a good deal of practice.

At school, I enjoyed languages most, and took French and Spanish, along with History, for A levels. That meant there was no room for English, and so for my whole life I have been able simply to read what I want when I want, and only for pleasure or interest. I suspect that this has been really important for the way I write, making it so much easier to think always of the reader.

I studied Politics and History at University, and the interest in political issues shows up in many of the books. After university I taught in a girls’ secondary school for a year — exhausting! — and then moved with my husband to Oxford, where I worked as an Information Officer for Oxfam. Though I was only in this job for two years, it changed my attitudes to money, to ‘things’, and to what is truly important in life, for ever.

In 1971 my first daughter was born. Unable to get to the library in a snowstorm to change my library books, in desperation I sat down and started to write a novel. Clearly this was the right job for me, for I have never stopped writing for more than a few weeks since.

My husband’s job took us to California, Arizona, Michigan and Canada, where our second daughter was born. In 1981 I returned to Edinburgh, and a few years later moved to County Durham, where I now live quietly in a stone house beside a river with Richard, my partner of fifteen years.”