Dame Jacqueline Wilson
Children's novelist Dame Jacqueline Wilson talks about her new Victorian-based novel
Award-winning author Dame Jacqueline Wilson is best known for her children’s literature that features young characters in challenging situations such as abuse, grief, foster care and mental illness.
Over 30 million copies of her novels have been sold in the UK alone, with many of her stories being adapted for theatre and TV. The former Children's Laureate is often cited amongst the most popular writers in the country, and in 2004 she replaced Catherine Cookson as the most borrowed author in Britain’s libraries.
As a child she filled notebooks with her imaginative tales before writing her first novel at the tender age of nine. She was clearly destined to live life pen in hand.
Having left school at 16, Dame Jacqueline was given her first writing break a year later on the magazine Jackie, but her heart lay in writing novels. After some 40 books she began emerging as the success she is today in 1991 with The Story of Tracey Beaker, which became her best-known series and a popular television show.
Despite her hectic schedule, Jacqueline still gets through a book a week, and her library of some 15,000 books extends into an outbuilding in her garden.
Her latest novel, Sapphire Battersea, is a sequel to Hetty Feather, a Wilson-esque tale about an orphan determined to speak her mind, but unusually these novels are set in the Victorian period - a choice Dame Jacqueline talks about on the show.
VIDEO: Dame Jacqueline talks about her latest book, Sapphire Battersea
