Granite Noir: Children's Detective Adventures

Granite Noir: Children’s Detective Adventures

Maz Evans’ Vi is out to save the world, again!  Alice Eclair is a baker by day and France’s youngest spy by night in Sarah Todd Taylor’s latest book.  Fun, frolics and fancies galore as we chat to these two brilliant authors and get to know their brave and intrepid young investigators.

Chaired by Amy Liptrott

Please note that all children must be accompanied by an adult for the duration of the talk.

Sarah Todd Taylor

Sarah is a children’s writer living in beautiful mid Wales. Her first book, Arthur and Me, won the Firefly Children’s Book Competition 2014 and was a result of her love of history and of the amazing legends that she used to read, growing up as a child in Wales.

Sarah loves cats and puzzles and the theatre, three things that made their way into her Max the Detective Cat series which is published by Nosy Crow.

She longed to write a mystery series set in a theatre and once she got thinking about the cats that keep theatres free from mice, Max was born, a clever cat who lives in a London theatre and, when not chasing mice away from nibbling the velvet cushions, solves dastardly crimes.

Sarah was thrilled when she was given the chance to write another series for Nosy Crow and after visiting the fascinating Bletchley Park she just had to write a spy series, with more puzzles and with lots of codes thrown in. Writing about cake was a lot of fun too.

She has also had short stories in various anthologies and newspapers and a monologue on Radio 5.

Maz Evans

Still unsure how it happened, Maz Evans is apparently the author of the bestselling Who Let the Gods Out?, Vi Spy and Scarlett Fife series, which have collectively sold over half a million copies to 22 countries worldwide. They have received over 30 award nominations, including the Carnegie Medal, Branford Boase, Books Are My Bag, Waterstone’s Children’s Book of the Year, Indie Children’s Book of the Year and CrimeFest Best Children’s Book. She narrates the audiobooks for the series and her acclaimed live events have featured at Hay, Imagine, Edinburgh, Bath, Cheltenham, Bestival, Wilderness, CarFest and countless literary festivals and primary schools around the UK.

Maz has contributed to RETURN TO WONDERLAND, THE BOOK OF HOPES and SWALLOWED BY A WHALE and her children’s poetry has been published in Caterpillar magazine. Her career began as a TV journalist, writing for The Daily Telegraph and TV Times magazine and she still regularly broadcasts her views on anything from politics to parenthood on BBC Radio 2 and the bus.

As a scriptwriter, her original musical H. R. HAITCH (with composer Luke Bateman) was produced at the Union Theatre, London in 2018. She has previously had shows produced at the Actors’ Church Covent Garden, Southend Palace Theatre and Bryanston Arts Centre and she was awarded places in the Holby City and Casualty BBC Shadow schemes.

As a songwriter, Maz won the Iris Theatre songwriting award three years in succession (with Luke Bateman) and her cabaret songs are regularly performed in the West End and beyond. As an author, she has won the hearts of thousands of children and as a nuclear physicist, she has frankly been completely rubbish.

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