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Michael Rosen celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birth of Beatrix Potter with a specially commissioned poem, ‘The Unknown Story of how Beatrix Potter met Karl Marx’. For Michael, the lasting appeal of Beatrix Potter is in the way she holds the hand of the child reader, teaching them how fiction works, and in the extraordinary pictures with their roots in nature illustration. Michael Rosen’s latest book ‘Good Ideas: How to Be Your Child's (and Your Own) Best Teacher’ is out now from John Murray.

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Robert Muchamore is the author of the hugely popular CHERUB series (Hodder)Ìýknows that the books he writes must compete for attention with computer games. Robert explains that children often think in a way that is much more sophisticated than they can articulate, and that it is vital to remember kids have a different attention span, and that they appreciate ambiguity

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Frances Hardinge’s book ‘The Lie Tree’ (Macmillan) won the 2015 Costa Children’s Book Award. Frances set her book in the Victorian period, which meant that she had to do a lot of research, but she still has a ‘creeping dread’ that she got something wrong! Frances is interested in creating characters for children’s fiction that aren’t very likeable.

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Illustrator Sav Akyuz was sketching one day when he came up with an image of a bear with ‘a sparkle in his eye’. Bear just wouldn’t leave Sav alone, and he took the character to his friend the writer and performer Ben Bailey Smith who wrote the words for their book ‘I am Bear’ (Walker). The relationship between words and pictures in children’s books is a complex one and as Sav explains, you can read the pictures, but they don’t always tell the same story.

The Story Beast is an immortal wizard and occasional bard who inhabits the body of comedian John Henry Falle. The Story Beast had been around for a long time, so he should be good, but is in fact a rubbish hero. John Henry Falle has been inspired by his reading habits which were firmly stuck in the early 20th century. The Story Beast performs at the Soho Theatre from

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