An Edinburgh Festival report from Pamela Butchart, author of Baby Aliens Got My Teacher! and The Spy Who Loved School Dinners.
Visiting the Edinburgh Book Festival to see my favourite authors, raid the amazing children’s bookshop and soak up the atmosphere has been one of the highlights of my year for the past four years. And this year was definitely the best so far. Not only was I lucky enough to see my all-time favourite author, Judith Kerr, for the second time at the festival, I was also very honoured to be asked to do my own events.
I think I might have had some of the best fun of my life during my event. We played games and laughed about horrible teachers, crisp twins and interrupting your mum on the toilet. But the BEST bit was when we all made our BABY ALIENS using plasticine and gave them all POWERS such as invisibility, laser eyes and even shape-shifting powers. And then named them awesome alien names such as Zap, tentacle-bum and Dave before making glow-the-dark spaceships for them to zoom around in. We ended with a surprising game of ‘Heads Down Thumbs Up’ where everyone turned into aliens and left with alien-eye head-boppers to prove it! (I have the best job ever!).
And when I ran out of stickers during my book signing (with one child left) a flash of creative genius from my husband resulted in the best sticker ever!
Other highlights of this year FAB EdFest included: live drawing with Axel Schefler; jam scones and laughs in the Yurt; Emer Stamp’s very funny Pig event, David Levithan’s though-provoking words, dinner with a side of Russian-mystery chat with Nosy Crow folk and Richard Herring, and Gordon Brown stealing my seat in the Yurt.
Roll on EdFest 2015!!!
Thank you, Pamela! You can take a look inside Pamela’s latest book, The Spy Who Loved School Dinners, below, or order the book online here.
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