ABOUT US

Islington Writers for Children is a group of children’s writers and illustrators. We’ve been meeting fortnightly since 1995 with one simple but challenging aim – to create great stories to entertain, enrich and inspire young minds.

Between us, we write and illustrate across the whole spectrum – books for babies, spectacular paper engineering, vibrant picture books, fun read-alone stories, and novels to intrigue and linger in the mind.

How does the group operate? Work in progress is read aloud at our meetings. It’s a rule that we don’t read our own story – we listen (with strictly no interruptions!) while it is read. It’s this careful listening, followed by experienced and constructive feedback from each member of the group, that we believe gives our work the edge when it’s pitched to the highly competitive publishing industry. Amongst the twenty or so members, most are published and many are award-winners.

We take our work seriously but there’s fun and firm friendship too. Tea-break tales are alive with experiences from the worlds of theatre, music, teaching, journalism, art, languages, medicine, film-making, travel and parenting. The large and amiable resident cat, who always attends at tea-time, is now a fount of knowledge on many subjects!

All our authors and illustrators are available to visit schools, literary festivals and children’s book events – if you love reading, we’d love to meet you, so why not give us a buzz?