Elizabeth Hopkinson's Hidden Grove

Forget Super Saturday or Super Sunday.  I've just got back from Super Swanwick, the annual Writers' School in the heart of Derbyshire, where I return year after year to meet old friends and new, learn new things, share tips and enjoy Britain's craziest live entertainment.  My highlights for this year were... 1. Running into Ingrid from the National Gallery/Liars' League prize, and subsequently running a pop-up film showing of both our stories being performed at the National Gallery. 2. Steve Hartley's 4-part course on the Psychology of Characters.  If you have to ask what "knicker net.com" might be, you clearly weren't there! 3. The fancy dress disco, for which I dressed as Jasper Fforde's literary detective, Thursday Next.  Yes, that's THURSDAY NEXT I'm dressed as.  Surprised how many people hadn't a clue, when there were at least three Thursday Next novels lying around the conference centre.  True fans we will pleased to know that I t...

Last Friday (22nd July) I had the most amazing time at the National Gallery in London.  I was one of five winners of a competition run by the Gallery and Liars' League London for new short stories inspired by a painting in the National Gallery.  I chose The Family of Darius Before Alexander by Paolo Veronese , which you can see behind me in the photo.  I was so excited to find the real painting in the Gallery; I was practically dancing about in front of it! Picture courtesy of Liars' League Related Post: Ladies, Gentlemen and a League of Liars The event was part of the National Gallery's Inspiration Late event.  There were loads of different activities going on in different rooms, and our storytelling event was in Room 61.  As you can see from the photos, each story was read by an actor, next to a print of the painting that inspired it.  It was fascinating to hear all the stories, and to discover the different ways in which the authors had...

I would like to thank the wonderful people at Waterstones, Bradford Wool Exchange for a brilliant prize that I won a few weeks ago - free lunch and a copy of The Girl of Ink and Stars by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.  You can see the lunch here, right before I ate it! I've now finished reading the book, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  It's one of those books that is a physical object of desire, before you even start reading the story.  It has maps!  (You've got to love a book with maps.)  Actually, the main protagonist, Isabella, is a cartographer's daughter - hence the ink and stars of the title - and maps play a big part in the story.  The book also has blue and yellow map-themed decoration on every page, and blue writing.  Perfect. The story itself is a children's/teenage fantasy, set on an island called Joya.  According to myth, it used to be a floating island, but is now divided and ruled by a cruel governor.  However, when Isabella's friend goe...

31st May is blog link-up day for fairy tale anthology  The Forgotten and the Fantastical II,  published by Mothers' Milk Books.   For the link-up, I'd like to share with you this video from the Royal Ballet, about reviving the 1946 production of  Sleeping Beauty. My contribution to the anthology, a re-imagining of  Sleeping Beauty  called   Rêve/Revival,  was partly inspired by footage of an old Royal Ballet production of  Sleeping Beauty , starring Margot Fonteyn. The version I watched was recorded especially for TV in 1955, but the live theatre version was staged in 1946, to re-open the Royal Opera House after the Second World War. I didn't know about the 1946 version when I wrote  Rêve/Revival , so it's fascinating to discover more connections between  Sleeping Beauty , war and new beginnings.  In my story, both the Napoleonic and First World Wars change the map forever, while humans and fairies fin...

In my last blog, I talked about a book I read while I was ill ( The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee). Well, as it happens, I read quite a lot of books while I was ill - there wasn't much else to do! One of them was the very influential I Am Malala, which led me to produce this re-write of Cinderella, highlighting the difficulty of education for girls in many parts of the world. Please watch and share!  And if you want to know more about the work of the Malala Fund, and how you can help make a difference, visit them at malala.org.

The Silver Metal Love r, here pictured with another unusual romance, The Ghost Bride. During the colder months - while I was ill, in fact - I read Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover for the first time. It was an emotional read, and it's only now that enough time has passed for me to be able to write about it objectively. Briefly, the book is about a girl called Jane, who falls in love with a robot called Silver.  Silver is basically the perfect man - he's been designed to bring pleasure and happiness to people.  But Jane finds it hard to believe that a robot could genuinely be in love with her.  Meanwhile, Silver's creators have pronounced him "faulty" and want to destroy him. It was only when I went looking for fan art of Silver, that I saw someone had suggested the tale is based on the myth of Persephone.  This got me thinking about other aspects of the story, and realising that the book is actually packed with references to Greek myth (and a little bit to ...

Yesterday, I read this excellent blog post by Liberty Hardy (aka @MissLiberty) on Bookriot, listing 100 strange and unusual novels. http://bookriot.com/2016/04/11/i-got-your-weird-right-here-100-wonderful-strange-and-unusual-novels/ I was rather disappointed that I'd only read three-and-a-bit out of 100 (I'm actually in the middle of one right now!) But then I remembered that I've read plenty of other bizarre books. And enjoyed most of them -I do love a bit of weird! So I thought I'd make my own list in response, beginning with the original four and going on from there. Sadly, I could only come up with 30 at short notice (it's Monday morning!) but it's been fun to reminisce. 30 Weird Books I Have Read 1. Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre I believe Bookriot described this as "if David Bowie wrote historical fiction." 2. The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen So, this author vanishes in a flurry of snow, and... 3. Brave Story by Miyuki ...