Melvin Burgess tells the tale

The award winning novelist for teenagers, Melvin Burgess, gave a talk about his work to 60 eager S3 pupils in the library on Monday 7th March. He talked about how he works and the amount of research he does for his hard-hitting novels. He started by talking about Junk, the Carnegie award winning novel about drug abuse and homelessness, and went on the discuss Nicholas Dane a hard-hitting novel about child abuse in children’s homes. Of course, he also talked about many of his other novels too. There was a lively question and answer session and all the pupils and staff greatly enjoyed the visit. We think Melvin did, too.

 

The session finished with a competition: Melvin told the pupils some of the story of the Volsunga saga (inspiration for his novels Blood Tide and Blood Song) and challenged them to work out how Sigmund, chained by his arms and legs to a tree and with the aid of only a 7 year old girl and a pot of honey, managed to defeat the great wolf which was about to eat him. There were many weird and ingenious solutions suggested before Bryan Carey hit on the solution and won himself Melvin’s own copy of Blood Song.

 

Pupils and staff have been buzzing about the session ever since.