The Biog they put on leaflets.<\/p>\n
N<\/span>icky has written four novels for adults, two books of non-fiction but most of her recent work is for young people. Her first children\u2019s novel Feather Boy<\/i> won the Blue Peter \u2018Book of the Year\u2019 Award, was adapted for TV (winning a BAFTA for Best Children\u2019s Drama) and then commissioned by the National Theatre as a musical with lyrics by Don Black and music by Debbie Wiseman. In 2010 Nicky was asked by Glyndebourne to adapt her novel Knight Crew <\/i>(a re-telling of the King Arthur legend set in contemporary gangland) for an opera with music by Julian Philips. In 2012 her play Island (about ice-bears and the nature of reality) premiered at the National Theatre and toured 40 London schools. She subsequently re-wrote Island as a novel with illustrations by former Children\u2019s Laureate, Chris Riddell. Her new novel The Survival Game<\/em> is a migration road-movie about a girl with a bullet-less gun and what she\u2019s prepared to risk \u2013 or sacrifice \u2013 to stay alive in a climate ravaged world. If you want to join the conversation about how to keep our planet beautiful and our future bright, check the #ChooseLovetoSurvive<\/a> campaign.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Biog they don\u2019t put on leaflets<\/p>\n W<\/span>hen I was six, I won a bar of chocolate for a story I wrote about a giraffe. This is easy money, I thought, I\u2019ll do this again. \u00a0And I did – entering various essay writing competitions sponsored by\u2026 Cadbury\u2019s chocolates. Every year I won a box of chocolates, actually it was a tin in those days. I ate the chocolates, kept the tin and planned a life in writing. Two other things happened, I acquired a raft of younger sisters and, when I was fourteen, lost my father. That sounds like I mislaid him. I didn\u2019t. He died very suddenly, very unexpectedly and he didn\u2019t say goodbye. I often think all of us are born storytellers but those who become writers have a trigger, and it\u2019s often a cataclysmic childhood experience. For me it was that death. I could talk more about that, but I won\u2019t here. I would if I met you because I like talking about difficult things \u2013\u00a0that\u2019s also what makes me a writer, I think.<\/p>\n Then there were the sisters. My mother had enough on her plate trying to feed and clothe a brood of five, my brother (aged 15) and then the four girls, from me at 14 to my youngest sister just 9 months old. Often, when my mother was still on kitchen duty, I went to put the middle sisters (9 and 5) to bed and part of that routine was storytelling. I developed a set of characters for each of them. For my sister Jane, a host of lunatically larger-than-life comic personae which reflected her big personality and made her laugh so convulsively I thought she had some variation of whooping cough. For my younger sister, Ros, I invented, with her help, a much safer, quieter set of people, animals mainly, taking part in cosy stories with unfrightening ends. Truth is, I even rigged up an intercom once between my bedroom and that of my elder brother and told him stories too. Or one story \u2013 I told it for hours (I think about three) and when I finally finished and asked him what he thought of it, he didn\u2019t reply on account of the fact that he was fast asleep. Turned out he\u2019d only heard the first five minutes of it, so I cut the intercom cord. I\u2019m a sore loser.<\/p>\n Anyway \u2013 there I was, a writer in the making, when my godfather ambled into view with the idea (he was an organist) of writing a cantata for children. He needed someone, he said, to write the words. I was 16. Jonah and the Whale was my first published work. I earned just over \u00a319 for this \u2013 a fortune then.<\/p>\n After that life took over for a while and I went to university (where I studied English, of course) and then I arrived in London and worked for a time in the Talks department of the ICA, meeting writers like Salman Rushdie (in fact I have a signed first edition of Midnight\u2019s Children) and Graham Swift and Norman Mailer, and writing seemed a perfectly normal thing to be doing. So I wrote a few short stories. Two of them got broadcast on the radio in those heady times when radio did stories by total nonentities. One story was also runner-up in the Fiction Magazine competition as judged by Kazuo Ishiguro. That story \u2013 The House is Us<\/i>, was actually printed in the magazine. When I got the letter from the editor \u2013 Judy Cooke \u2013 to say she would be publishing I blotted her signature to see if it was real. I thought one of my friends was winding me up.<\/p>\n Then, of course, I started on my first novel\u2026..<\/p>\n To be frank, it wasn\u2019t plain sailing. But that\u2019s another story.<\/p>\n OH \u2013 and I\u2019m married with three children. The children are called Roland, Edmund and Milo – and, actually, they’re pretty grown-up now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Biog they put on leaflets. Nicky has written four novels for adults, two books of non-fiction but most of her recent work is for young people. Her first children\u2019s novel Feather Boy won the Blue Peter \u2018Book of the Year\u2019 Award, was adapted for TV (winning a BAFTA for Best Children\u2019s Drama) and then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":{"0":"post-4","1":"page","2":"type-page","3":"status-publish","5":"entry","6":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P5JE8T-4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1391,"href":"http:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4\/revisions\/1391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}