Louise Rennison
Louise Rennison - author, comedienne and scriptwriter - was born in Yorkshire, and in spite of her autobiographical one-woman live show Stevie Wonder Felt My Face in the 1990s and her regular contributions to various comedy scripts, she is probably most well-known for her best-selling Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series of books for teenage girls...
After an assortment of jobs (playleader; dental nurse) and travelling, Rennison enrolled on a performing arts course, and although her career as a performance artist got off to a shaky start, (after one audition, a tutor remarked, "You are obviously a very intelligent girl, Louise, but you must never go on stage again. Your performance made me feel physically sick."), she persevered with the performing, an avenue that gradually led to writing comedy scripts and of course, the inherently funny books of Georgia Nicholson. She continues to perform her own shows (the imaginatively-titled Bob Marley's Gardener Sold My Friend and Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head), writes for the Evening Standard and works frequently for Radio 4.
The series records the exploits of teenager Georgia Nicolson and her best friends, the Ace Gang, and are based in part, according to Rennison, on her own childhood in Leeds, where she was bought up in a three-bedroomed council house with her parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousin.
The series of subversive diaries of Georgia Nicholson have now reached their sixth volume and have been acclaimed by their teenage audience as both consistently funny and tellingly true to life ever since they first appeared in Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging in 1999. More recently, sales in UK for the series have reached 400,000, while US sales have been even bigger - there, they top the million mark and the books have reached Number 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list.
Startled by his Furry Shorts is priced £10.99, and is available from all good bookshops now.
