Vanessa Curtis
- Name: Vanessa Curtis
- Previous job: Secretary, Recruitment Consultant, Newspaper Sales Clerk
- Favourite Artists: Kahlo, Perry, Dali, Nash, Hepworth, Wallis
- Favourite Television Shows: Coronation Street (best scriptwriting ever)
- Favourite Films: Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Age of Innocence, The Pianist
I used to think that children's authors were born that way - that they went to school, maybe did journalism at college and then wrote their first book for kids and were sorted for life. What happened to me couldn't have been further from that ridiculously idealised vision of an author's life. Now I realise that most children's authors have had at least one other career before taking up their pen. I had loads - would-be rock star, secretary, newspaper sales clerk, recruitment consultant etc. My first two published books were non-fiction. My first fiction was written for adults rather than children and like so many angst ridden semi-confessional debut novels, it never saw much action outside of the box marked 'rejection' under my desk. The second novel was written for children but went much the same way. The third got a very long and kind letter from a particular agent but he boldly suggested that I go off and write something else. So, slightly miffed, I did, and that's how Zelah Green was born.
Writing Zelah was more fun than work. I wrote her to a feisty soundtrack of loud rock music and she exploded out of my head onto the screen and sprung into life with her red cheeks and frizzy black hair. I'd already had her name stashed away in my head since driving past a signpost marked 'Zelah' on the way down to Cornwall. In fact I realised that my head had been storing stuff away for many years in a computer file called 'things to use one day in kids' fiction' including some memorable images from a documentary I'd once seen about people who lived with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. There didn't seem to be a lot of fiction out there for children living with the condition, so I gave Zelah the biggest challenge of her life and made her an Obsessive Compulsive.
The story uses the framework of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but the setting and characters used in the novel are about as contemporary as it gets because I wanted to make the content of the story appeal to today's kids. Since becoming a published children's authro, however, my own life now has elements of the fairy tale about it.
Vanessa Curtis
Vanessa Curtis is originally trained as a pianist before becoming a freelance journalist and contributing articles to a range of magazines and newspapers. She is the author of two biographies on Virginia Woolf - Virginia Woolf's Women and The Hidden Houses of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell - as well as a reviewer of fiction and non-fiction for broadsheet newspapers. She is the co-editor of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin, a literary magazine, and also works as a freelance literary consultant. By her own admission, Vanessa "almost fell into writing for children by accident" and with Zelah Green, Queen of Clean on the short list for the Waterstone's Children's Book Prize 2009, she is finding life as a children's author exciting and flattering yet baffling... "It's like somebody is treating is as a real book or something. Gawd. Anyway, I'm thrilled!" Vanessa lives and works near Chichester Harbour and has her own website www.vanessacurtis.com.
