Primary 6 children from St Ronan’s and St Mary’s were treated to some stimulating sessions from new children’s writer D.A. Nelson. Recently nominated for the 2008 Royal Mail Book Awards, Dawn read extracts from ‘DarkIsle’ and explained the inspiration behind the characters and story. The children loved finding out how Shona the dragon in ‘DarkIsle’ was based on the stone dragon at Irvine beach and Bertie the Dodo came into being from Dawn’s love of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and the fact that she had never seen a Dodo used as a character in any other stories she’d read. The extracts Dawn read from her novel left us all wanting to find out what happened in the adventures of the 10 year old heroine, Morag and her wonderfully unusual friends.
