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.

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.

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.

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 Beano and Why Comics Matter Comics have long been the secret weapon of children’s literacy - visual storytelling that hooks reluctant readers, fuels imagination, and delivers complex ideas with clarity and humour. For me, The Beano was not just a comic; it was a portal to mayhem!

Book prizes used to be rare honours. Now they’re everywhere - from international juggernauts to niche gongs for every genre and age group. In this insightful (and slightly cheeky) blog, I explore how this prize culture reshapes publishing, boosts authors, powers marketing machines like The Bookseller, and raises the question: are we celebrating excellence - or just addicted to applause?