River Boy Award-winning

Tim Bowler is the author of many books for children, including River Boy, which won the Carnegie Medal in 1997.

More about Tim: “I live in the south-west of England in a sleepy Devon village. It’s a beautiful county and I’ve lived there since 1983. My workroom is an old stone outhouse ten minutes’ walk from my home. You can see a bit of it in the photos over to the right of this page. Family and friends call it Tim’s Bolthole. It’s situated in a quiet part of the village with nothing to hear but birdsong and the occasional snort of horses in some stables. When the weather’s fine, I take my laptop out of the bolthole and into a nearby meadow so that I can sit and write outside. It’s a lovely spot with hills rolling away into the distance, a badger sett down to the left and the tower of the village church just visible to the right. There are lots of foxes, rabbits and birds and sometimes you can see wild deer on the far slopes. It’s a great place to think and write.

Writing is my life. I have lots of things I love doing – playing sports, reading, listening to music, walking, practising yoga, translating foreign languages – but for me writing is special. I’ve written stories all my life. I’m a storyaholic. I believe in the power of stories to move us, entertain us and transform us. To me, writing is as much about listening as it is about putting down words. I start from characters and settings. If the characters and settings are strong enough, then I usually find the plot reveals itself, albeit through a sometimes laborious series of rewrites. Some people think there must be a set of rules for writing but the truth is there aren’t any. It’s more like tickling trout, holding your hand out and trying to coax the ideas to swim into your grasp; or being a potter, throwing the rough clay of your thoughts down and letting the story twist out under the palms of your hands; or being a sorcerer, stirring the cauldron of your imagination and watching the vapour of the story rise. Writing is all these things and many more. It’s something you never bottom, never crack, never stop learning about. And that’s why I love it.”