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Jacqueline Wilson Visit
Jacqueline Wilson, award-winning author and former Children’s Laureate, visited the Junior School on Friday 15 October.
Ms Wilson addressed the pupils in her characteristic friendly tone, touching on her vast and diverse range of books and numerous adaptations of her novels for television; commonly dealing with such challenging themes as adoption, divorce, and mental illness. Addressing these issues has made her extremely popular yet somewhat controversial because of her young readership.
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Ms Wilson's stories focus on realism much more than most children's books, and have tackled such difficult themes as vagrancy, abuse, grief, divorce, foster care and mental illness. She usually writes in first person singular narrative, and occasionally experiments with alternating viewpoints in her novels such as Secrets, The Lottie Project, and Little Darlings.
Ms Wilson has won many awards, including the Smarties Prize, and the Guardian Children's Fiction Award. The Illustrated Mum won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award and the 2000 Children's Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. It was also shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Children's Book Award. The Story of Tracy Beaker won the 2002 Blue Peter People's Choice Award. Girls in Tears was the 2003 Children's Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.
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In June 2002, Jacqueline Wilson was given an OBE for services to literacy in schools, and from 2005 to 2007 she was the fourth Children's Laureate. In this role, Wilson urged writers to make more books available for the blind and also campaigned against cutbacks in children's TV drama.
To celebrate modern-day prose at its best, we included two local primary schools (St. Michael’s CE Primary School and Highgate Primary School) in the event, taking place in the Mallinson Sports Centre.
The feedback from pupils and parents alike was that of delight to be given the chance to speak to one of the nation’s favourite and most prolific of authors. VN
Highgate School, North Road, London N6 4AY