Video transcript
2018 NSW PRC author interview - A F Harrold

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Premier's Reading Challenge here, live backstage at the Sydney Writers' Festival primary schools day. I am here with a very special guest, AF Harrold. Welcome, and thank you so much for joining us. We're really excited to have you here today.

AF HARROLD: I'm really excited to be here. It's a pleasure. I've never been in such a nice room with so many mirrors, so many mirrors.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: I now. Lots of lights and lots of mirrors.

AF HARROLD: It's very good.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: And welcome to the festival. You were just telling you this is your first time in Sydney.

AF HARROLD: Other than changing planes once to go to Brisbane for a poetry festival. Very good poetry festival in Brisbane.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: OK.

AF HARROLD: Ten years ago.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: And I believe we may even get some poetry squeezed out of you a bit later on down the track. I'm really excited that you're in Australia. And you're going to tell us a little bit about your books today. I know that you've just spoken to some students outside, some readers. The Premier's Reading Challenge is all about reading and enjoying books. Were you somebody that always loved to read?

AF HARROLD: Yes. Yes, books were wonderful things when I was small. There were some books in our house. We weren't on of those houses that was filled with books, but there were some books around. I got my very first paper cut from a book called 'Thorburn's Mammals.' it was a book of beautiful plates, you know, plates, colour pictures on very nice stock. And I remember my first wounding from a book.

I learned at a very early age that books are dangerous if they're in the wrong hand. If you're being attacked by someone, or a wild animal-- you have plenty here in Australia, plenty of dangerous animals-- whip a book out. Spider, bfft. Crocodile, chase.

I don't know if crocodiles play fetch. I don't know if you can describe a crocodile by throwing a stick and saying fetch. I'm not an expert, so kids of Australia, do not trust me on your wildlife safety advice. I am not one of those men who is qualified to give you wildlife safety advice. Basically, in Australia, don't trust any of your animals.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: It's very true.

AF HARROLD: I mean what other country has venomous mammals? Nowhere else has a venomous mammal. Those little spurs, what's that all about?

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Well, Australian kids take their lives in their own hands when they walk out the front door. But we are used to it now. We're very well equipped.

AF HARROLD: I mean, that's natural selection. That probably is that, that only the best kids grow up to be Australians.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: That's right. We breed them tough here.

AF HARROLD: What were we talking about?

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: I don't know.

AF HARROLD: Books. Yes.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Books. But obviously, you read any kind of book growing up, or were there particular kinds of books that you liked?

AF HARROLD: Well, two sorts of books. There's books that are lying around the house, which can be all sorts of books, atlases, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, the interesting bits of the Sunday supplements. When people used to get newspapers, there used to be lots of extra bits on a Sunday, and then read the cartoons in the Sunday supplements.

But then also the library. The library, brilliant place. My dad used to have an evening job when I was little, used to have a cleaning job in the evening, a local dentist's in town. And I think probably to give my mum a rest, he'd take me with him quite often.

And because dentist's places after hours are terrifying, all the lights are out, there's just that chair sitting in the middle of the room, looming like some sort of torture device. You know, that bit in 'Empire Strikes Back' where Han Solo's strapped on the rack thing, and Darth Vader's talking to him, he's thrown back in the room. He goes, I didn't even ask any questions. That's what a dentist surgery after hours is like.

So my dad didn't take me there. He dropped me at the library in Horsham, West Sussex, England, go do his job for a couple of hours, and pick me up on the way back. So once a week, maybe. They're all dead, so I can't ask them the questions about the facts, which is really annoying now. But regularly, I'd be left in the library on my own for a few hours every week.

And I ate my way through all the books with my eyes. Don't actually eat library books. Eat your own books. That's fine. Books you've paid for from a bookshop and taken home, eat them. That's allowed. Library books, other people, they want to be available for everyone.

So I read all sorts of books there. I wasn't discriminating. I read fiction, all sorts of fiction that was on the shelves. I read my way through that nonfiction shelf as well, books about dinosaurs, books about birds, those Usborne books about how to be a spy. Do you remember those?

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: That was one of my favourites.

AF HARROLD: I mean, all of those. I got more education from those shelves and nonfiction books than from school. I was autodidacting before I even knew what an autodidact was. That was how I thought about it. So yes, I read lots of books is the short. I could've just said that. I could have just said, yeah, I read loads of books when I was young. Yvette, ask me another question. Carry on.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Well, I'll lean onto it, because you know, this talking about a library, there's a library that figures heavily in one of your stories and one of your characters. Could you tell us a little bit about Fizzlebert Stump?

AF HARROLD: Of course I can, children.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Which we don't have sitting there.

AF HARROLD: I wrote a book that does-- no, I don't think-- there's not a Fizz in this bag. Sonia is pointing at my bag. She's not given me a Fizzlebert Stump either. I wrote a book called 'Fizzlebert Stump, The Boy Who Ran Away From The Circus And Joined The Library,' about a boy called Fizzlebert Stump who lives in a circus. And about a third of the way through the book, he leaves the circus and tries to join a library.

That much you could have worked out from the book. But trying to join the library, gets kidnapped by some old people and taken back to the house and locked in, and forced to do cleaning up. Which is not a brilliant way, but he escapes. I'm not going to tell you how, but there are five more books in the series, so he doesn't die in the first book.

Which was the first draft, but my publishers said, no, no, don't kill your children's characters in the first book in the series, because the other books are just going to full of blank pages, or full of people being sad, going, do you remember that really lively boy in the first book. He's dead now. Oh. Although I think that's a brilliant idea for a series. I'm now going to pitch that.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Well, don't tell the readers all your good ideas.

AF HARROLD: You guys, you've got a sneak preview there of my next series. The book of the boy who was dead. I like it.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Well, you heard it here first, folks.

AF HARROLD: But Fizzlerbert Stump, who's about a boy who lives in the circus, has zany adventures across a series of several books, which are very funny, very digressionary, lots of brackets. If you like books that suddenly go off on a sort of tangent in some brackets, and then go off another tangent inside some more brackets inside the first brackets, and then close all the brackets up properly, never are there dangling brackets left, and sort of diversion, then come back to the story, you might enjoy the Fizzlebert books.

So there's another library in the books, another important library in the books. This book, the imaginary, beautifully illustrated by the amazing Emily [? gravatt. ?] There's an imaginary friend called Roger, imaginary boy here, and his real friend, the man that gets knocked down by a car about a third of the way through the book. And Roger's left on his own, no one there to imagine him, and he begins to fade away.

But he gets rescued by a cat, a cat called Zinzan, who takes him to a place where imaginary friends can look for a bit between jobs. If you imagine a sort of agency of imaginary friends who every time they hear that a kid needs a friend, they sort of go, oy, Bill, little Timmy, 6 years old, likes trains, needs a friend. Wil you do that one? Yeah, I'll do that one, and he'll sort of go off and do the job.

And the place where this agency exists, where these imaginary friends live, is in the library, because there's enough innate imagination in those walls of the library sort of leaking out of the books to keep imaginary people alive for a time. It's a sort of place they can rest between jobs. And so Roger finds his way back there. And there's a lovely phrase in here. I'm going to read you a quote from the book.

It says, 'Roger was in a library. Amanda had told him about them, but he'd never seen one before. She'd said, 'It's the best sort of indoors there is for a rainy day. Every book is an adventure.' And she loved adventures.' So I quite like that. A rainy day, an amazing place to go and hide out. And every book is-- when you think, the brilliant thing about a library, brilliant thing about a bookshop, brilliant thing about the world that we live in, is that there's so many books.

Some of them are really boring. Some books, you're going to pick up and go, ungh. And you have to learn that it's all right, when you find a book like that, to throw it away. Don't actually throw it away. Put it down. You don't have to finish every book you start. If you start a book and you go, don't like this one, put it down. Pick up another book.

Give that one a go. And you'll find that there's something for you somewhere. It might take a few books to find that book or that author or that series that really sets the fire going in your head, but when you find it, boy, you're going to enjoy reading it, and you're going to want to read that author's next book, or search out their backlists and go and find that.

And the people who are going to help you find that, because you go into a library or into a bookshop, and there are shelves and shelves of books, where do you begin. You go and ask a librarian. You ask a teacher. You ask your friends. You read book recommendations in the comics you read.

You get tips from people, and librarians are brilliant. Librarians are amazing, because they know so much. And if you say to them a few things that maybe you like, they will be able to go, oh, if you like so-and-so, you might enjoy this, and they are better than an Amazon algorithm.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: But why don't you tell us about your new book that's coming out, the next Greta Zargo adventure. Tell us a little bit about Greta and what she faces in this next exciting adventure.

AF HARROLD: OK, OK, listen. Tell you what. Let's tell you about the first Greta Zargo book, and then just point at the next one, because this will give you the idea. Greta Argo is an orphaned schoolgirl reporter. She's 11 years old. She's been living on her own since she was eight, because her parents died when she was a baby. And in that will, their last will and testament, it gave everything that they owned to her aunt to hold in trust for Greta.

But because of a legally binding spelling mistake, it was held in trust until her eighth birthday. So when she turned 8, she got everything, the house, the library cards, everything. It should have said 18, but a legally binding spelling mistake is a legally-- not a legally binding spelling mistake. That's something quite different. That's when a lawyer blows off in the office, in front of the judge. Oh it's dreadful, dreadful. If you're going to be a lawyer, don't eat beans before you go into court. This is my advice to you.

It's good advice. It's good advice. Lawyers actually come to me to ask me for nutritional advice, and basically, that's all I know. That's all I can tell you. Don't eat beans, you know, any of those things, those gas making things. If you've got an important case, don't eat those things and then go see the judge, unless you are representing a clown or something, and you want to sort of join in. The circus, he's been embezzling from the circus. I don't know. I don't know how it works in Australia. I'm not an expert.

But Greta inherited all their stuff, and she's 11 now. She's a reporter. Cakes have gone missing in the little town she lives in. She lives in a town called Upper Lowerbridge. I always confused it with Lower Upperbridge, which is a town just up the road. But in Upper Lowerbridge, Mrs. Hummock has had a cake go missing. It's a spongecake with peanut butter fondant icing.

It's gone missing, and Gretchen has been sent to cover the job by her editor at the newspaper. And she goes to cover this job, and she thinks to herself, this is rubbish. It's rubbish. It's a cake. A cake has gone missing. This is not a front page story, even in the local newspaper that she writes for. It's not a front page story. Maybe it's page three. Page four, maybe. Maybe page two, but sort of bottom half in the gutter there.

So she wants a bigger story. But then the next day, another cake goes missing. And she realises she's got a serial cake thief on her hand. Not a cereal cake thief, not someone who's going around stealing cereal cakes, but a serial cake thief on her hand. And so the story gets bigger, so it gets more exciting. But at the same time as this story, there's another story happening in the book.

Alternating chapters, very clever. Alternating chapters about these death robots, because the book's called 'Greta Zargo and the Death Robots from Outer Space.' and these robots are travelling from planet to planet across the galaxy, encountering strange and interesting alien races and destroying them, destroying their planets, killing all the aliens.

And they have now reached the planet Earth, and the only thing that can stop them from destroying the planet Earth is Greta Zargo. But Greta doesn't know this. She's hunting down this cake thief, but at the same time, she has to somehow save the world. And so it's a science fiction comedy. It's a science fiction whodunit cake-based, Great Australian Bake Off, comedy, girl investigator, newspaper journalist training book. It's possibly the only one in that genre.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: I think you'd find that [inaudible] agree.

AF HARROLD: But I think it's a genre we're starting. So if you enjoy, it's sort of Hitchhiker's meets Goth Girls, or Douglas Adams, Christopher, that sort of thing. Illustrated beautifully by Joe Todd Stanton. So if you like sci-fi comedy with feisty girl reporters, that might be the thing for you.

And the new book, 'Greta Zargo and the Amoeba Monsters from the Middle of the Earth,' the threat is different. It's from the middle of the Earth instead of from outer space. Amoebas monsters eating everybody, her aunt's gone missing, ahh, what's going to happen. I'll read you a little bit from the book. Pick a page between 1 and 213.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Go for it.

AF HARROLD: No, pick a page.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Oh, me?

AF HARROLD: Yeah, not the whole thing. Just pick a page. Yeah, they can't pick a page. OK, kids, shout out a page number you'd like to have me read a bit from now, and I will disappoint most of you.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: 114.

AF HARROLD: 114, one one four. 114. Brilliant. So whoever it was who shouted 114, kid, this is for you. I'm going to read the whole page. I'm going to read the whole page for you here. This is the end of chapter 10, and it ends like this. 'Menancingly, jellily, in time, the whole Earth and everything on it would be there's for the eating.' 114. There we go, read the whole page for you. So that is Greta Zargo. If you comedy, sci-fi, horror, James Herbert meets Douglas Adams meets AF Harold.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Oh, I wish we had time for you to read us that whole book out loud. Thank you so much, AF Harrold.

AF HARROLD: It's been my pleasure. In fact, it's been a pleasure meeting you.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Absolute pleasure to meet you.

AF HARROLD: Absolutely, thank you.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Haven't laughed that hard in ages. Thank you so much for joining us at the Premier's Reading Challenge backstage.

AF HARROLD: And kids, keep on reading books and things. Comics count, and magazines count too, so just read stuff.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Yeah.