CHILDREN’S author and Scottish Arts Council Award winner, Margaret Ryan, is in Cyprus this week for a series of lectures for ‘Book Week’, organised by the Highgate Primary School in Nicosia.
Ryan, the author of the successful series The Littlest Dragon, recounted how she came to write stories for children.
“I became an author by accident. I was looking for an intellectual exercise, I wanted to write something, and that set me off writing children’s stories.”
“My first book was published in 1988, but I have been writing for a little while before that,” she says.
Margaret was born in Paisley and now lives in Greenock with her husband and two children. She trained as a teacher at the Jordanhill School of Education in Glasgow and taught in schools for four years. She gave up teaching when her children were young but went back to supply teaching when her youngest was five. Margaret then went on to teach disabled children and then creative writing courses for young offenders. She started writing as a hobby, but finally gave up teaching to write full-time. She has written stories for radio and television and has had numerous articles published in newspapers and magazines.
The choice to write children’s books was purely accidental. “I just wanted to write, there was no real direction,” she says.
“I get a lot of letters from children, telling me that they enjoy the books and, and it’s wonderful to see the kind of things they pick up on,” she said
In Ryan’s version of the Canterbury Tales, a book involving family called the Canterburies, Ryan says a lot of children tell her how the characters in the book are exactly like, or as horrible as their own brothers and sisters.
“You have the big sister’s tale, the little sister’s tale and the little brother’s tale, and the children tell me how their brothers or sisters, are exactly like the ones I describe in my book. My books are based on reality, through experiences that my children, or friends’ children have had.”
Ryan has received the Scottish Arts Council Award for best book for beginner reading for The Queen’s Birthday Hat, and is due to release a trilogy of books about children with special gifts, and another, which will target older readers, entitled, Operation Boyfriend. She has also been commissioned to write educational books but Ryan says she focuses primarily on entertaining young children.
The author will be in Cyprus until the next Saturday, after which she is planning to enjoy a vacation with her husband.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
