Queen Camilla's Christmas gift of Impossible Creatures to 800,000 children is well-aimed and well-meant. But it reveals how we've come to think literacy works: as something bestowed. From France's pass Culture to the economics of non-fiction, forty years of making children's books suggests a different answer - and a longer clock.

From Bowdler’s Shakespeare to Puffin’s edited Roald Dahl, publishing has often chosen to smooth away awkwardness rather than explain it. But sanitised texts, missing credits and silent rewrites do more than tidy the past — they erase evidence, authorship and the people who made books possible.

Peter Pan, Christopher Robin and Alice became immortal children. The people behind them had to carry those fictional identities into adult life. A chain of literary coincidences links bookshops, publishers, illustrators, family tragedies and two men who might have understood one another but never met.

While writing The Short, Strange Life of Dr John William Polidori, I began to see a strange thread running from the machine-breaking of the 1810s to the current fight against AI scraping. The loom, the vampire and the algorithm may seem unlikely companions — but all three raise the same question: who profits when human skill is harvested by someone more powerful?

What makes a children’s information book worthy of prizes, readers and long shelf life? David Salariya looks beyond award formulas to explore curiosity, design, storytelling, enthusiasm and the real secret of memorable non-fiction: writing for children first.

A bestseller is not a successful book. It is a measurement. When two million people buy the same novel in the same decade, they are not all responding to the prose style, or the plot, or the cover. They are responding to something the book supplies that ordinary life, in that particular decade, is withholding. The sales figure is evidence of a specific collective hunger. And if you know how to read it, it tells you more about a society than most official records.

Writing is no longer only something authors do. It is also something sold back to them through courses, critiques, webinars, mentoring, self-publishing advice and promises of access. This essay asks when publishing stopped merely selling books to readers and began selling the dream of authorship to writers.

There has never been an easier time to enter publishing — or a harder time to be noticed. Micro-publishing, print-on-demand and digital tools have lowered the drawbridge, but they have not removed the moat. In an age of AI slop, the new independent publisher must become gatekeeper, editor, designer, curator and provenance-keeper.

Before Amazon and algorithms, children’s book clubs brought curated, affordable books into homes, schools and workplaces. From Puffin Post to Red House catalogues, this is the story of a vanished reading culture.

Is coincidence fate, pattern, or just the story we tell ourselves? In this interview, Patricia Borlenghi discusses A Book of Coincidences — her literary memoir about memory, identity, and the serendipitous moments that shape a life — alongside publishing, belonging, and what it means to live between two cultures.

The Bologna Children’s Book Fair isn’t just an event — it’s where global children’s publishing decides what survives. From instinct-driven acquisitions to geopolitical tensions, here’s what really happens behind the scenes — and why, even in 2026, nothing has kept the industry away.

Before AR became a buzzword, I built interactive children’s books using webcams and printed pages. Here’s what worked, what failed—and why the market wasn’t ready.

AI authorship has arrived — and publishing isn’t ready. Books can now pass through the entire editorial process without anyone being entirely certain how they were made. The question is no longer what we’re reading, but who — if anyone — truly wrote it.

A dish older than poetry. A poet who refused refinement. And a nation that celebrates its greatest writer by addressing a pudding. The curious, ceremonial, and quietly radical history of haggis and the Burns Supper.

What happens when decades of creative labour are repackaged as “the start of an idea”? An industry explainer on attribution, acquisition-led growth, and why visible human authorship matters more than ever — especially in the age of AI.

Audiobooks are valuable, inclusive and powerful — but they are not the same as reading. For young children especially, decoding print is a skill that can’t be replaced by listening. In our rush to keep reading alive, we risk blurring a distinction that really matters.

Auteur is not a pretentious relic. It is a lost word of precision — one that distinguishes vision from branding, authorship from automation, and human intention from machine output. In an age of infinite content, clarity matters. David Salariya

In 1961, Billy Bunter left Greyfriars and headed for Butlin’s. It sounds absurd—but this curious crossover reveals a moment of marketing brilliance, class collision, and cultural change in post-war Britain.

Colouring-in can be calming and good for control — but it’s not the same as drawing. Drawing builds thinking, memory, language and confidence. Here’s a plea for “beyond the line” creativity (plus easy ways to encourage it)

Adventure isn’t about recklessness — it’s about agency. A practical, publishing-savvy guide to writing children’s adventure stories that move, matter, and endure.