CBI's Tom Donegan welcomes Derek Landy

Over the weekend the Ark welcomed four amazing children's authors for StorySpark's Reading Room events. First up was Derek Landy, the author of the popular Skullduggery Pleasant series, who made a spectacular entrance and a big impression on our audience - especially the girl he danced with!
He discussed the real-life person behind his heroine, Valkyrie Cain; art school; and how he once ended up with thirteen cute-but-dangerous cats living in his house. He has four more books about Skullduggery planned - to complete three trilogies - and with the enthusiasm of the audience on Saturday, it's not hard to imagine they'll be as successful as the first five.


Next up at 4pm was Anthony McGowan, who joined us all the way from England and read extracts from his book Einstein's Underpants and How They Saved the World. His enthusiastic delivery was infectious and we all felt that Alexander and his band of superheroes - including Really Annoying Girl and Tortoise Boy - were really in the Reading Room with us. Safe to say that Anthony found a few more fans in Dublin!

On Sunday, many people braved the snow and the slipperiness to see Roddy Doyle. Appropriately, he read from his last book, Wilderness, about two boys who search for their mother in the snowy wilds of arctic Finland. He told us it was based on a holiday his family went on several years ago, and that if it had been snowing in November that year, they would have gone somewhere warm instead and Wilderness might have been set in a desert! We also got a sneak peek of his next book, A Greyhound of a Girl, which isn't due out until September 2011.

Frank Cottrell Boyce came from Liverpool to snowy Dublin - despite falling along the way he still managed a fascinating reading. He read from his books Cosmic and Framed, and also from his next book. I was particularly intrigued by his wide-ranging sources of inspiration - art history, criminology, astronomy, geography, history and physics to name but a few. Luckily his well-informed audience were well able to keep up as he discussed visiting NASA, why people queued to see a blank space in the Louvre, and how he may have unwittingly inspired an art robbery.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the basement Bob and the crew from The Gutter Bookshop were keeping up with the demand for books, and upstairs in the Story Lab we were busy making our own stories, from volunteers, children, and grown-ups alike. We have an ever-growing number of stories for schools and families to listen to in this week's StoryLab: funnily enough, quite a lot of them involve snow...

Next week in the Reading Room we'll have Mary Arrigan, Aubrey Flegg, and Ali Sparkes on Saturday and Tony Mitton, Enda Wyley and Larry O'Loughlin on Sunday, while Pat Ryan is our resident Storyteller.