Author - Emma Carroll
On Tuesday 6th November, Year 5 went to visit Whitchurch Primary school, to meet Emma Carroll. Emma is an author of children’s books and she was going to talk to us about how she got her ideas for writing her latest book – Secrets of a Sun King. History gives Emma many ideas for her stories, and Secrets of a Sun King was written using her experiences when she went travelling in Egypt. She shared some of the background research that she had to do to make her story sound like it could have happened.
It takes Emma about a year to write a book – after getting her first idea, she has to do lots of research before she can write a first draft. Once the draft has been written, it will go back and forth to an editor, who helps her make improvements, until finally the book is published.
Emma lives in Somerset with her husband and two terriers. She works in her study and says that her terriers can sometimes be helpful because they make her take a break. However, she also says that having a large mug of tea is important!
We also learnt that before becoming a full-time author, Emma Carroll was a secondary school English teacher. She has also worked as a news reporter, an avocado picker and the person who punches holes into filofax paper.
At the end of her talk, Emma answered some questions from the children. She told us that she thought it was just as important for girls to read books about male characters as it was for boys to read books about female characters – she usually has a male and female character in her stories. She also said that it was important that the girls in her stories did brave and exciting things, and that the boys showed their sensitive side.
Many of us bought her books and got her autograph after her talk. We are enjoying reading them and next term we will use Letters from the Lighthouse to help us learn more about our World War II topic.
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