ASPIRING authors from MHSG gained priceless advice on how to improve their craft from one of the UK’s leading children’s authors.

Norfolk-based Kevin Crossley-Holland hosted a workshop at the school as a prelude to the 2007 Children’s Bookshow Tour, which stopped off at Manchester’s Library Theatre.

Mr Crossley-Holland is renowned for his retelling of traditional tales, including a translation of Beowulf from the original Anglo Saxon text. In 1985, he won the Carnegie Medal for Children’s Literature with his novella, Storm.

The Seeing Stone, the first book in his Arthur trilogy, won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year.

Mr Crossley-Holland was impressed with the prose and poems presented by the MHSG students, but stressed that the success of any writer was based on their eye for detail, and an ability to edit and revise drafts of their work.

“It is a bit like chucking a lot of pebbles into the air and when they come down into the water, they make their own sounds,” he reflected.

After an insightful morning, the MHSG students made their way to The Library Theatre where Mr Crossley-Hall was joined by the German children’s author Lilly Thal, and pupils from across Greater Manchester for the Bookshow Tour Event.

Photograph courtesy of  www.kevincrossley-holland.com