“Working with last year’s winner, Tina Shaw, has  been an absolute delight. Her standout entry Ursa shone from the outset. And her unstinting work ethic and desire to deliver the strongest book possible has made our blossoming relationship with her a real pleasure. Ursa is a book for our times and a tour de force for Tina. Everyone at Walker Books congratulates her and celebrates the launch of this extraordinary book with her.”

One thing that really struck me yesterday was the sheer amount of female talent in the place – I was blown away by all that womanly writing and publishing. The line-ups on the stage for the Notable Book Awards: nearly all women. The Storylines organisation is run by strong and talented women … and look at One Tree House (my publisher): Christine and Jenny are dynamos, and have just picked up a major publishing award at the Bologna childrens book festival. I was very impressed by the sheer energy in the place yesterday. So fitting that we had the strong and positive Jacinda to speak to us and give the MM medal.

And we saw – nothing; we saw something not yet become; we saw something, not a face but perhaps, I thought, when I thought about it later, perhaps a negotiating position for a face, perhaps a loosely imagined notion of a face, like God’s when he was trying to form us; we saw a blank we saw a sphere, it was without feature, it was without meaning, and its flesh seemed to run from the bone.

– from ‘Comma’ in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

‘That morning I drove past salt pans and vast eucalyptus woodlands into monochrome treelessness. The overcast sky spilled to earth, its blotchy greys hard to distinguish from the cloudy puffs of knee-high scrub stretching windblown and insubstantial to the horizon. The gunmetal two-lane ribboned out changeless until the afternoon surprise of Madura Pass when there was a sudden decline as the Hampton Tableland gave way to the hypnotic Roe Plains. Down on the flats it was all sky. It was like travelling across the seabed, which is more or less what that land is. Everything looked scoured, as if one giant swell had just receded and another was about to come surging in. The only thing separating me from Elsewhere, it felt, was this low, dun-coloured shelf I was pelting across. I drove until I ran out of daylight and when I climbed down onto the dirt I felt stoned.’

It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.

Hello Tina, I am a Year 3 teacher in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England and my class is currently working on a writing project surrounding your book, The Cloud Rider. The children that I teach have been really inspired by your story and we have been able to use the theme of your book to develop some wonderful drama, speaking and listening and characterisation lessons. We enjoyed reading about your inspiration for the story, with the settings being intrinsically linked with your childhood and this gave us scope to use the structure of The Cloud Rider narrative to develop our own stories with the adaption of our own settings.

Once again, thank you for the inspiration for some wonderful developing writers.