Q & A With Janet Bingham

Meet Janet Bingham, author of My Little Star and A New Home For Little Fox.

Read on to find out more...

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1. What was your favourite book when you were a child?

Peter Pan. I still love books about magic, especially the Harry Potter books and The Lord of the Rings.

2. If you could be any character from a book, who would you be and why?

Billie Jean, the mother in Roddy Doyle’s The Giggler Treatment. Billie Jean practises mountain-climbing by running up and down stairs with a baby on her back, and she bungee-jumps in the attic. She races across continents in the nick of time to save her husband from a terrible fate. She’s brilliant.

3. Do you have a favourite book about animals?

My oldest favourite is My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. I like it because Gerry has a great time exploring his island and meeting the animals who live there.

My new favourite is The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. Despereaux is a brave little mouse on a quest to save a princess. I fell in love with him straight away.

4. Can you tell us a secret about yourself - Something that readers might be surprised to learn?

I’m allergic to rats, which is a shame because some of my best friends are rats. We had two pet rats, and they were very good company, but if I ever cuddled them I got itchy lumps and bumps and a runny nose.

5. Lots of readers love writing and aspire to be authors when
they're older. Please could you suggest a first line (or a title) for them to turn into a story?

Sam squeezed through the hole in the wall and looked around...

6. What inspired you to become a writer?

When I was at primary school I loved to write poems. I had one particular teacher called Miss Wiltshire who was inspiring and encouraging. I write less poetry now that I’m grown up, but when my own children were tiny I enjoyed looking at picture books with them. I realised that some picture books are like poems; they tell a long story in a short way, and they sound good read out loud. I wanted to try and write something like that.

7. If you weren’t a writer what job would you like to have?

I’d like to be a scientist studying and protecting wild animals.

8. What inspired you to write A New Home for Little Fox?

Sky-gazing gave me the idea for My Little Star, which was the first book about Little Fox. The sky is right next to us - you can blow a kiss across a few inches of it – but it’s also endless and full of interesting things. It was fun letting Little Fox explore that.

Rosalind Beardshaw’s pictures brought Little Fox to life perfectly in the first book, and that made me want to spend more time with him. Little Fox is very curious, and I think it was his own idea to find out about other people’s dens and nests in A New Home for Little Fox.

9. How old were you when you first started writing?

My mother has a poem I wrote when I was around five. It’s about a moth. My interest in both writing and animals started early!

10. What are you working on next?

A story about a little mouse and the tales he hears about cheese and moon magic.

11. Do you have foxes in your garden and are they friendly?

It’s possible. My garden ends in a little wild wooded area, and sometimes deer, squirrels, hedgehogs and mice come to visit. We also have lots of garden birds, including a woodpecker who likes to eat the hanging peanuts. I’d be thrilled to see a fox here, but I haven’t yet.