Their Lost Voices Must Continue To Be

I Don't Buy Into The Idea That An Irish Writer Should Write About Ireland, Or A Gay Writer Should Write About Being Gay. But When I Found The Right Story, I Saw It As An Opportunity To Write About Being A Teenager And Being Gay. Most People, Whether You're Gay Or Straight Or Whatever, Have Experienced That Relationship Where One Person Is Much More Interested Than The Other.

Very Slowly He Turned His Head Back To Look At Shmuel, Who Wasn't Crying Anymore, Merely Staring At The Floor And Looking As If He Was Trying To Convince His Soul Not To Live Inside His Tiny Body Anymore, But To Slip Away And Sail To The Door And Rise Up Into The Sky, Gliding Through The Clouds Until It Was Very Far Away.'' -the Boy In The Striped Pajamas

With The Adult Ones, I Feel I Need To Get As Deep Inside The Psychology Of A Character As I Can, And That Needs To Be First-person. In The Children's Books, I Feel I Need Some Distance. I Don't Want To Be The Nine-year-old At The Center Of The Story. I Need To Have Some Type Of Narrative Voice.

He Looked The Boy Up And Down As If He Had Never Seen A Child Before And Wasn't Quite Sure What He Was Supposed To Do With One: Eat It, Ignore It Or Kick It Down The Stairs.

Children's Book Writers Tend To Feel Quite Superior, And Adult Writers Tend To Feel They Wouldn't Know How To Write A Children's Book - Which Might Surprise You Because I Think A Lot Of People Think It's The Other Way Around.