By Naeemah Salloo and Iqra Malik, Year 9, Stretford High School
'Have you ever thought that something was straightforward till you met someone and realised it wasn't?'
On Tuesday 15th March, we were lucky enough to have the amazing author, Martyn Bedford visit our school.
The talk, led by the author of multiple adult and teenage fiction books, allowed us to emphasise with a real life author and have an insight into his life. It's one thing to read a book, visualise the words in your head and care about the characters that the storyline revolves around, but it is another extraordinary experience to meet the person who put the words on the pages and created this entire fictional masterpiece.
Every student was silent, hanging onto every word of Martyn Bedford as he narrated his journey on the way to writing and publication all the way from his high school days when he was the same age as us and hadn't even began to imagine life as a writer. It could even make us think - could we be like him in however many years time, standing with several published books and delivering a speech to many young people, inspiring them? The thought was rather interesting.
After a reading of Bedford's new novel, 20 Questions for Gloria, we had a Q&A session, a workshop was then led for selective students. Of course, the exciting workshop was led by none other than the author himself.
Even if you had no dreams of writing and hadn't ever constructed a work of fiction, this workshop allowed you to. Bedford had taught us a key piece of detail from his own writing experience- characters. During the workshop, we all created our own characters using postcards as stimuli which then led on to us beginning to develop our own story. Who knows; perhaps Martyn Bedford has inspired the next generation of eloquent writers?
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This blog has been written by Naeemah Salloo and Iqra Malik, Year 9 pupils from Stretford High School. Martyn Bedford visited Stretford High School courtesy of Walker Books to talk about his latest book 20 Questions for Gloria. Books were provided by Urmston Bookshop. The Manchester Children’s Book Festival work with a number of authors and publishers to bring authors into schools. If you are interested in hosting an author event in your school please contact mcbf@mmu.ac.uk
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