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Ben Brown

picture book writer, profile published in The School Library Issue 1, March 2009

For a while when I was young, I never read books. I grew up as a boy on a farm by a river and there was, so I thought, too much else to do. My father was a prolific reader and he was always on at me to read. He'd say things to me like, 'There’s a whole world in a book, son,' but I was far too busy gallivanting and skylarking and otherwise having fun. Until one day when he threw a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at me and firmly ordered me to 'Read it!'

Now it was a hardcover volume and I was a lousy catch, and the book sconed me on the noggin (my father was a very good shot), but I read it nonetheless ... and I was hooked. My father was right. Here was a book about a boy who, like me, lived by a river, but his world was a new and wondrous place peopled with strange and exotic characters who spoke and thought in ways that I had not even imagined. Here is the essence of writing for me, and it is what I most enjoy talking about when I visit schools.

And wouldn't you know, at the end of the day, I still had time for gallivanting.