My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As a child, I loved story books and wanted to be in them so desperately and live the stories.
My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.
Storybooks were always a big part of my imagination, and my childhood and adolescence.
When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.
I grew up in the suburbs among highly educated people, in a house crammed with books. It was a culture rich in ideas, stimulation, entertainment, and mental activity, all helpful to the nurture of an imaginative child who wanted from an early age to be a writer.
I came from a family of incredible storytellers, but I didn't start writing children's books until I was 41 years old.
I always wanted to write for children. When I was growing up, we were really poor. My mother had left, and it was all a mess. So I lived in my head a lot, and I would get lots of books for Christmas - from librarians and teachers - and they just fed my imagination.
I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.
What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
Although I could read before I went to school, and I won the school reading prize at five years old, my early children's stories came from the radio and watching films at a cinema on Saturday mornings in Australia. It wasn't until I was nine years old on a ship returning from Australia that I was introduced to children's books.
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