next, meet the author. we all know what it feels like to get lost in a book. in scarlett thomas's novel dragon's green she turns it into a story of magic and danger. a childrens' quest to make sense of a struggle turned upside down by a catastrophic event called "worldquake". a writer who has had great success with what is called literary fiction, she has had an experience that has changed her as much as any of her characters. welcome. so what did you discover about writing and about your own writing when you brought magic into the equation? "a lot" is the answer to that. early on in my career i started writing about maths and then i moved onto physics and then botany and now magic! like so many classics of children's fiction, you're stepping into another world, whether through a wardrobe or down a rabbit's hole and in this case by going back to a book as the doorway to some different world, it is obviously something that energises you. yes, and i think, for me, this is part of the whole concept of magic. i think books are magic. i think lots of things are magic, but books are definitely magic and that when you — you know, you open the pages and there are a black marks on a white sheet and they can transport you, they can change you, they can really do almost anything, it is astonishing. you wrote somewhere in the course of describing your irritation with the categorisation of books and we shouldn't think of literary fiction and children's fiction as being separate things, you also said every children's story, every novel i think you said, is a political text. can you explain that? yes, well... how long have you got? i think when you write children's fiction you have to make lots of decisions, and especially in a non—realist setting, and you are world—building from scratch, so i had to decide, for example, in the otherworldly characters called to there are a lovely big houses and groans and everything is a bit pg wodehouse, but how do you maintain that without servants and they kind of feudal situation which i don't believe is right for people to live in, so i immediately i have to confront these problems. if the characters brought breakfast, who does that and why? is she a servant? we discover more about how that world works. so in creating a new world, you have to invent rules and therefore you are saying things about how people live. when i studied politics years and years ago i discovered that politics happens in any situation with limited resources and you have to do decide how to divide things up. and i think it also happens at any fictional situation in which the author has made up fundamental things about the world. how difficult did you find it to think about the right rules for your world? it required the same leaps of imagination. it is plotting a world rather than just a story with any world, so at times it was easy and other times it took me months to come up with solutions, and some of them i are still working on! —— within a world. i haven't got to those bits yet. one of the things i am fascinated by years in the early sections particularly you are talking about life in school in many passages, and the sort of rules and the way that school works, and you clearly have a — an affection for the kind of discipline, almost, that would get people into learning. there is a very distinct kind of schoolroom that you described. can you tell us how that came about because i am intrigued. i think it is partly a kind of nostalgia. not political nostalgia but an anaesthetic nostalgia, not so much for what my school was like but what books were like when i was at school. we are going back quite far now. the main teacher who actually has your best interests at heart, that is an archetype that we find in a lot of areas. it is a reassuring archetype to you? i think so because i suppose i believe no one is really that mean. even the baddies in the books are all from the world up blushing, by the way. funny, that. they are all a bit too clever for their own good. they do have bad aims in mind. other than that, i do try to be compassionate towards my characters, so the mean old teacher yeah, she just wants the children to do well, and she is hilarious. and effie really is the heroine of the book, what is your feeling about her? is that a lot of you in her? there is. and the idea of the girl who who sets off on a quest, and difficult things happen and she has to keep going, that was important to me when i was writing the book, i had just been ill and it was a struggle to get better, and i found reading about other female heroes really inspiring. well, it's interesting that you mention that. you have been quite open about the fact that you had for want of a better word we will call it a nervous breakdown, and this is a book that followed that, so it is inevitable that you must feel quite strongly about some of the ideas about in the video was in some other things that come out in this book, that it is not just a chance collision of atoms, it is something that sprang from your own experience? absolutely. there were some scenes that i wrote that as i wrote them they kind of made me better, in a way, so when effie goes through the forest and she confronts her demons, something in me sort of settled. a straightforward metaphorical thing. yeah, and ifind especially with children's fiction and magical fiction that you are operating in that more archetypal sort of realm where you are dealing with these deep things, and i am completely better nowjust in case anybody is wondering. in some ways you want it to deal with them and it strikes me that you have found this form that came to you quite naturally, although there is a lot of hard work and problems to be solved, but the idea of doing it, that once you picked it up you never wanted to let it go, it allowed you that freedom. absolutely, and something about the voice that i was able to access for this book. different from any of your other novels. sort of, or more a kind of development of. i think each book is a development of the one that came before and this definitely develops the voice from the seed collectors which is an omniscient, free and direct style. you can go into people's heads. and you find they're complicated and flawed. is it always useful to have some characters who are always seen from the outside. you don't know what's going on inside their heads. you can have that rule and when you're writing, rules and restrictions are good because they make you work hard and imaginatively to solve problems, but on the other hand, i think i do go everywhere with this book and it is quite fun. you're suddenly with a villain minor character or are you zoom out to a kind of — this strange narrator who isn't quite god but is next to god. and for you, you are saying this is kind of fun. for me, i have found a voice that i didn't let myself use for a long time, or ijust didn't try it out and now i have found that it is amazing. i don't think it is necessarily an easier thing to do, but for me it was kind of coming home to my true voice. scarlett thomas, author of dragon's green and many more to come, thank you. thank you. hello there. what a lovely start of the weekend it has been. it has been hotting up across many parts of the country and more high temperatures over the next few days or so. we have the sunshine also in augusta at georgia for the masters with temperatures continue to rise here as well. light winds for the far north round. light winds across the uk today. change is coming to the north—west, mind you. all this cloud just waiting in the winds. that will start to move down across the uk in the next 2a hours or so. a chilly night tonight, especially in the country. those are the temperatures in the towns and cities. could be a few degrees lower than that in the countryside. and then in wales will see the pollen levels increasing again quickly in the morning. high pollen levels across most of england and wales. strong sunshine, to. that will burn not be mist fog quickly. more sunshine to begin the day across southern and eastern scotland, but we will see to discover the north—west, and that will bring rain into scotland and northern ireland, and eventually some cloud to the western parts of england and wales. a different look to the weather for scotland and northern ireland tomorrow. cooler than today. the cloud arrives in the rain becomes lighter as it has at least was. not much rental northern ireland, but more cloud. most of england and wales, dry and sunny. cloud late on in north—west england and west wales. a little sooner perhaps in the day across the far south—west of england. but the most of england and wales in the afternoon, it is warm and sunny. temperatures higher than today. 25. further north, for sunderland, it will be warm and sunny. tebbutt is not as high here. calling down on merseyside as the cloud arrives towards the end of the day. this is the last of the warmun, though. cold aircoming in behind the last of the warmun, though. cold air coming in behind this weather front with a north—westerly wind instead of the southerly that we have had over the weekend. that weather front producing little or no way in yet again. —— rain. more in the web are coming in. this could give us showers here or there. most of the showers of northern scotland, where there could be wintry over hills. yes, it it could be that cold. tebbutt is struggling to get into double figures in scotland. significant drop of temperatures in england and wales. eight or nine degrees continent with sunday. a shock to the system on monday. that cool air comes in on tuesday as this weather front comes into the top, together with strong and gusty winds bring in more cloud to northern ireland scotland. some heavy cloud for areas. tebbutt is no better than that or 16 degrees, but at least there will be some sunshine. —— northern ireland and scotland. —— temperatures. welcome to bbc news. our top stories: russia repeats its demands that america must prove that chemical weapons were dropped by syrian planes against civilians. the two powers agree to meet. swedish police reveal details about the man they believe was responsible for the lorry attack in stockholm and say he was known to the intelligence services. meanwhile, in neighbouring norway, police find a bomb—like device in oslo's city centre. they've cordoned off a wide area and a man has been detained. and the basque separatist group eta is handing over the last of its weapons, moving a step closer to ending half a century of violence.

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