Jubilee Books - You've dealt with some very serious issues in your books like disability, child abuse, asylum, do you purposefully set out to write about these kind of issues?
Elizabeth Laird - I don't really think of myself as an issues writer at all. What I do is think of a feeling, something I feel about very strongly, and that leads me to a situation.
Taking the books one by one, Red Sky In The Morning is a book about disability and is about my brother who was born when I was three and died when I was seven. The older character in the book, Anna, is a bit like my sister, but I never thought of it as an issue book but about something I knew about.
Kiss the Dust is about asylum seekers but that came out of a time when I lived in Iraq and visited Kurdistan which was a place I thought was so cool. The guys looked amazing, like Ali Baba with these stripey trousers and cummerbunds stuffed full of knives, big turbans with their fringes dangling in their eyes. They were very nice people and kind and welcoming to us. When I heard about what was happening to them I was really upset about it. So I wrote Kiss The Dust about the Kurds and also I wanted to write a war story, a modern war story, as I thought that there's so many stories about the Second World War, which happened 50 years ago, and we don't seem to have moved on to wars that are happening all over the world now.
Jake's Tower was a bit different as I don't feel that I wrote it, it just came to me. I had a picture one day about a boy running out of a house and I thought what was he running away from. Where that came from I just don't know.

Speaking of Jake's Tower, the subject of child abuse seems to be one that people find difficult to confront and not something that is often tackled in fiction, how difficult was it for you to write that book?
It wasn't really as I was so under the spell of the character. I was much more interested in him getting together with his dad and In a way you have to beat a character right down for them to come back up again. The violence was necessary for Jake to have that amazing moment when he meets his father.

Is there a character that you've created that you've really liked?
Well every book is different, when you're writing a book at that moment it's the only thing that matters and when you're finished you're casting around for the next character. It's rather like asking someone if they have a favourite a child, you love them all for different reasons.

And is the experience of writing every book different?
Oh very different. Kiss the Dust was very difficult, it took me a year to research that book and I felt enormously worried that Kurdish people would object. I wondered if they'd be patronised by it, or worried about a foreigner writing about them. I spoke to Kurdish people practically every day and I really inched my way ahead in that book. The book I've just finished, which is out next year, is very different. It's set in Addis Ababa and is about Ethiopian street children. I couldn't go back to the street children all the time and although I did have interviews with them it was a really imaginative task to get inside the heads of those kids because you're dealing with a different culture, lack of family and all sorts of different things.

You write your books in the first person and seem to really get into the emotional side of the characters, are they at all similar to you?
No not really, I wouldn't think so, I mean I'm not like a 13 year old boy being beaten up by his step dad. All I can say is that when I'm writing the books I have a very strong sense of the otherness of the child that I'm writing about so I don't feel like them. Secret Friends, yes, perhaps.

Your book Kiss The Dust was published a decade ago now, since that time the debate surrounding asylum and immigration has really come into the public focus, how do you think opinions have changed in that time?
Back then it wasn't an issue like it is now, I mean immigration was an issue but then in the seventies there was this thing that there was no one to man the buses or run the factories, so adverts were put up in places like Barbados or Gujurate and people were invited to this country. Some people reacted badly, some were fine about it. Immigration was the question then, which is a bit different from asylum. There has been such incredible scare mongering from the press, pictures of people at Sangatte climbing fences and so on, but this isn't totally representative of what's happening and there's been a lot of press manipulation about the subject I think.

How informed do you think the general public really are about global issues that may affect immigration and asylum?
Totally uneducated when it comes to genuine asylum seekers. I know lots of refugees who are here because they've been completely traumatised and people in this country have absolutely no idea of what they're are escaping from. People are often completely ignorant to the history of conflicts. That's one of the reasons I wrote Kiss the Dust, there's endless programmes about World War II and I wanted to write a book about a current conflict.

How do you think literature and in particular children's literature deals with ethnic minorities and issues surrounding multiculturalism?
That's a difficult question. On a realism level books like Beverly Naidoo's The Other Side Of Truth, Bernard Ashley's Little Soldier, books by Malorie Blackman are fairly straight forward books dealing with issues of race. You could also look at fantasy which can subliminally deal with those kinds of things. In Terry Prachett's latest book, The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents, there are ways in which you could cast the characters in terms of the privileged and the under privileged.
I don't think there's enough though, but a lot of children want to read escapism and they read all kinds of books which is great, one day they'll read the Beano, they'll read Dickens the next day, an Anne Fine book the next.
I think if you try preaching to children and set out to deal with a certain issues then you can forget it because that's not the way good books get written, good books get written because there's a story although it can be an issue.

You've published a number of stories that are set in Africa and some that are based on African oral traditions, what was it like turning stories that have evolved through an oral tradition into written narrative?
That's been brilliant, a completely incredible project. I've done five huge journeys in Ethiopia collecting stories from traditional story tellers at camel markets in the desert, to mango trees by rivers, to huts in the mountains. I can speak some Amharic so I would get the gist of story. The story tellers would tell the stories absolutely straight, very much like the style of the bible. In the African oral tradition there's a wonderful spareness, they don't bother with adjectives, they don't dress it up, they tell the bare bones of the story and do a lot of colour with the voice. After the story has been told there's always a discussion about the meaning of the story and that's when you'd get the philosophy and politics coming in which is what was really interesting. They'd all sit round chewing some narcotic leaf and chat away about what the story means. So in When The World Began I tried to reproduce the simplicity of the original narrators. Very often you have to listen to the story several times to kind of unpack them and really be able to make the narrative work.

Who were your favourite writers as a child?
I loved historical fiction, Geoffrey Trease. I was also a great one for Victorian weepies. My aunt had an attic full of those and I'd read all those, they used to tear my heart strings and I'd cry and cry. Maybe that's why I write sad stories myself.

Do you have any favourite children's writers at the moment?
I read everything, biographies, history books, I love reading children's fiction, there's some wonderful books out there. I liked The Kin by Peter Dickinson, I loved Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson, I'm a great fan of Anne Fine, I love goodnight Mr. Tom, Paper Faces by Rachael Anderson. Loads of children's fiction, although I'm not into to fantasy much I did enjoy Harry Potter.

Where else have you travelled? Where are you favourite places?
Well Ethiopia, parts of Kenya, New Zealand where I was born, I thought India was wonderful and I've just been to China which was really cool.

What other jobs have you had?
My first job was when I was 18 and I went and taught in a girls school in Malaysia for a year, although I got bitten by a snake and got typhoid I had a great time. Then I got a teaching job in Ethiopia living in Addis but travelling all over the country as well as a job as a disk jockey on Radio Voice of Gospel broadcasting to all of Africa and India.
I also have another job, or my other interest is producing materials for Ethiopian schools and I'm working on a website magazine for Ethiopia which is going to be a magazine style format with monthly articles on health, stories, sport, the arts and so on. They'll also include exercise material; grammar, vocabulary, teachers notes. They'll be downloaded by satellite phones in to all kinds of places and sent out around the villages for people to read.

When did you start writing?
When I left Beirut and decided to go freelance I had already been writing African readers which were very simple but pretty good training for writing novels, and historical books for Longman about life in Britain so I was already a writer although not of fiction. When my son was three I wrote a picture book which I sent off to various publishers and amazingly it got picked up at Heinneman and they published it. I had this wonderful editor called Jane Fior who's retired now but still edits my books and has become a great friend.
Jane suggested to me that I write a novel and asked me what memories I had of childhood so I told her about my brother and from that came Red Sky In The Morning. That was highly commended for the Carnegie and is still in print after nearly 15 years.

How do you relax? Do you have any hobbies or interests outside of writing?
My garden. I've got a vegetable garden with potatoes, strawberries, gooseberries, redcurrents, runner beans, spinach, rocket and rhubarb. I read a lot, some patchwork and I like films. I liked Monsoon Wedding, I like thrillers. There's two films by a director called Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one called Kandahar and the other Blackboards which is just stunning.

What are you working on at the moment?
I've just finished a book set in Addis Ababa about street children called the Garbage King. I'm also writing a series of books for Egmont on conservation and different kinds of aspects of wildlife which is both fun and really interesting to write about.

What are your best tips for budding writers?
Read, read, read, write, write, write. Keep a diary. I wrote a diary when I was a kid and wrote a page a day which I still read all the time. Confidence is a big thing for writers too, that comes with the more you practice. Be brave, it's very hard to show something you've done to someone else, I find it very hard.

Interview conducted with Joseph Pike June 2002
Material © Jubilee Books 2002.
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