Michaela Kolofsky

But it was a world where somehow the goodness of people and the strength of a community came through.

And then also you had just these wonderful storylines about animals.

So a moral tale with, you know, a pain to the heart in it.

So, okay, so this is your formative years.

It's wonderful to be able to remember the first time that you were moved to tears by writing.

I'm quite envious that you can do that.

So where to from there?

That's interesting because your book, Honey Bee, is about this friendship between 14-year-old Sam and a much older man, in fact, an old man called Vic.

So, yes, obviously we can trace now the shape of that.

What are you saying there, Craig?

You mean like there was a few bits with folded over corners that you might go back to or what?

Yeah, but that's an important part of reading development, don't you think?

I mean, people might call them pulpy or trashy or whatever, but they give you story and they also help you in that passage to reading quickly, just to devouring fiction.

Yeah.

Yes, well, it has great horror, it has great inventive elements, having its own language, and also this morality, which it seems at first that there is an absence of morality, but in fact it's quite a profound meditation on the nature of evil, on what it is to be simply human.

The very kind of big questions of life.

It's almost a perfect entry point for a young man into literature.

Okay, onwards from A Clockwork Orange.

Oh, we're accumulating some really classic books here.

Craig, Sylvie, fantastic stuff.