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Broadcasting with the Book Trust

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Alistair Mooney Alistair Mooney | 09:32 UK time, Thursday, 7 October 2010

Back in the summer (remember that?), I wrote a blog post for the Scottish Book Trust website about . Well, today sees the next author in the series take his turn - step up Charlie Higson. We asked for her take on the whole Authors Live experience.


As part of 's children's team I get to help organise and attend a lot of excellent children's book events. They normally consist of an author, some members of Scottish Book Trust staff and a few hundred children. Even the smaller sessions are fun and it's the variety of events that we do which make the job so interesting.

However, not being content with seeing around 10,000 children a year in schools and theatres around Scotland, we decided to think bigger. In partnership with Â鶹Éç Learning Scotland we've started filming the biggest and best names in children's fiction at the Â鶹Éç and broadcasting the events live over the internet to hundreds of thousands of children UK wide. This is Authors Live!

So how does it all work? Take one amazing children's author, get them to the Â鶹Éç, invite a studio audience of school children, set up a few cameras, enlist the help of some technical wizards from the Â鶹Éç and make sure you let people around the UK know when to sit in front of their computers or whiteboards to tune-in live *deep breath!*. Saying it like that makes it sound relatively simple but watching an event take shape from beginning to end is very exciting and takes lots of hard work from many different people. The Scottish Book Trust children's team is made up of 4 people but the team at the Â鶹Éç is much bigger, each person doing a very specific task. There are producers, camera men, photographers, runners and most importantly, lots of techy people who do complicated techy things (we don't ask - we just leave them to it). I think the rest of my team would agree that it's great to get out of our office and work in a very different way.

So far we've had events with Michael Rosen and Julia Donaldson and our most recent event was with the incredible Michael Morpurgo in June.

Michael Rosen, Michael Morpurgo, Julia Donaldson

To see such a prominent author speaking live must be one of the most exciting things a reader can do. To learn their secrets, their methods, ask them questions even though you're hundreds of miles away, hear them read their work - it doesn't get more inspiring than that! I'm sure I'm not the only person who sits there thinking, 'YES! I too can to write a novel!'

I'm incredibly excited about today's event with Charlie Higson - already anticipating the buzz before the rehearsals start, the audience are seated, and Janice Forsyth (our amazing chair) gets us warmed up.

And it doesn't stop today - our events continue with Philip Pullman, Jacqueline Wilson, and Eoin Colfer. I have no doubt they will be just as brilliant to watch. Seeing an author event never gets old, I know I'm incredibly fortunate that I get to do it for a living.

My favourite bit about the Authors Live programme though, is to be sitting at the edge of the studio space watching 30 children waving down the camera to many thousands of children who are watching at the same time (I like to think they're all waving back). Technology is incredible, and to put it to such fantastic use is something which makes everyone involved very proud.

Watch all of the events and find out more about the programme at the Authors Live website.

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