Elizabeth Kay is a poet, writer and teacher of Art and Creative Writing. She lives in Surrey. The
Divide, her debut novel for children, was published to enthusiastic reviews and has sold over 150,000
copies worldwide, in countries as far afield as Japan, Finland, the USA and Canada. The sequel, Back
to the Divide, was published in August ’04 and is showing every sign of being even more successful than
the first book. Elizabeth’s publisher is Barry Cunningham of The Chicken House – known as the man who
set up Bloomsbury’s children’s list and signed the original Harry Potter contract with J K Rowling.
Elizabeth Kay was one of the first new writers he signed for The Chicken House.
“…sometimes funny, sometimes moving, always captivating: a real winner.” - Books for Keeps
“…delightful, funny, but also gently wise”. - Times
I wake up quite early, and I always have fruit for breakfast – exotic things like mangoes or paw-paws or rambutans (big red lychee-type fruits that look as though they’ve had a bad hair day). Whenever I go abroad I head for the local market, and buy the weirdest fruits I can find.
My days aren’t the same, because sometimes I’m teaching, and other times I’m writing or researching. My favourite days are writing days, if I’ve got to an exciting bit and I can’t wait to find out what happens next. Researching days could mean visiting The Natural History Museum, or meeting a tiger-keeper, or learning how to throw pots, or eating a yam. I like to use things that have actually happened to me whenever I can, because you remember all the little details – the sounds and the smells and the textures. And you remember the unfamiliar things best of all, which is why holidays are very important to me.
When I wanted to create a really nasty creature, I thought back to the scariest thing that had ever happened to me – a hyena sniffing around outside my tent in the middle of the night in Kenya. That’s how the sinistrom in The Divide came into being. And when I wanted a magical setting, I remembered the cloud forest in Costa Rica, and all the brilliantly-coloured birds and butterflies and flowers. In February this year I went to Iceland, to see what a snowy volcanic landscape looked like (and smelt like – the occasional whiff of rotten eggs because of the sulphur in the water!) When you’re researching something one idea leads to another, and the more unusual the first idea the better…
There are two people I show my work to – my agent, Carolyn, who is very down-to-earth and doesn’t let me get away with anything, and my daughter Dorothy. Sometimes I have to email a few chapters to Dorothy, as she’s often in The Ivory Coast, in West Africa, doing a PhD about dung beetles. My other daughter, Krzysia, is far too busy as she has two young children – but she used to be a junior school teacher, so I always look forward to her opinion of the final book!
If it’s a writing day I alternate between writing and some other activity, like gardening or painting, and I may carry on until midnight. Sometimes I’ll take a break and go for a walk, and I always have my binoculars with me as I like bird-watching. I may take my camera to record the insects and wild flowers I see, which I then try to identify from a field-guide when I get home. In the autumn I’m on the lookout for toadstools. I don’t watch much television, and I usually read for a bit before I go to sleep.