Tom Palmer
Avid football fan and children’s author Tom Palmer is this month’s interviewee. Tom wasn’t always good at writing. He says he did badly at school and hated reading in particular, until he was 17. However, reading about football changed his life. Nowadays Tom is the author of two popular football fiction series for children, the Football Detective and the Football Academy. Tom is passionate about promoting reading through the motivational power of sport. He often works with the National Literacy Trust’s Reading The Game project and recently helped to develop the World Cup toolkit that features lots of exciting activities for teachers and librarians to inspire young people’s reading. Tom also visits schools and libraries where he delivers the Football Reading Game, a reading quiz and penalty shootout. Get in touch with him via his website at: www.tompalmer.co.uk or email him at info@tompalmer.co.uk to see if he is available to visit you.
Do you think it would it matter if boys only read books about football?
No, it wouldn’t matter. I think that we should read about what we are interested in – and not just because we think reading is good for us. I would only read about football when I was younger. It was the only thing I had the stamina to read about because it was my great passion. Reading about football gave me the will – and, more importantly, perhaps, the confidence – to read more widely. For instance, I started to read non-fiction about war after football. Then fiction about war. Then fiction about other things. No pressure was put on me to read ‘something more worthy’ and I evolved at my own pace, without pressure.
What comes first for you – football or books?
I love books, but football comes first.
Tell us about the World Cup Mystery story that you are writing as part of the Reading The Game World Cup toolkit.
The World Cup Mystery instalments will be available on the National Literacy Trust website every weekday during the World Cup from 7 June to 11 July. It will be a five to seven minute read every morning. The story will follow Danny Harte, my football detective, but it will also respond daily to the events of the tournament. The scores. The off-the-field tensions. Any crises going on. As a result it will be very relevant to the children. Our idea is that it will be a classroom read every morning, but I know lots of children will be reading it independently too.
Tell us about the ideas and activities that feature in the World Cup toolkit. Which activity is your favourite?
They are all ideas that will use the interest in the World Cup to promote reading. There are ideas for activities, displays, book groups, games and guest speakers that can help schools and libraries enthuse readers and non-readers. My favourite is probably using the day’s newspaper headlines to stimulate discussion and more reading. Black out a word from the football headlines (like the name of a player), then ask the kids to guess what the missing word is.
What do you do to make your writing interesting for children?
Good question. That is vital to me. The key elements for me are to start with a bang, something exciting to draw the reader in. To keep the pace up. To be sparing with description, but not to eliminate it. To have lots of dialogue. To have a hook at the end of each chapter that will drive the reader on. To have characters that are realistic and that the reader will care about. To have villains that infuriate the reader and me.
Did you enjoy school? What was your favourite subject?
No, I didn’t enjoy school and I was not very successful. In fact, I was so weak at English, age 13, that they did not let me take English Literature or French at GCSE. My favourite subject was football and maybe computers.
Why are you involved with Reading The Game?
Because I think it is brilliant. I have been involved for seven or eight years. I work with thousands of kids every month, using football to encourage reading. They take notice of the posters of England players reading. They look at the lists of what footballers like to read. They love doing the wall chart where they can aim to read 100 books and maybe get a football prize. All these schemes work. Football can have a powerful influence on children’s lives. Sometimes that is negative, especially the way some footballers behave on and off the pitch. But with Reading The Game it is nothing but positive.
What would be your advice for teachers and librarians encouraging children, especially boys, to read?
Encourage reading on any subject and in any format, including newspapers and magazines. Discover what they are interested in and what their hobbies are and find the right material for them. Be aware (as I am sure you are) that they may show a different attitude to reading when they are alone with you, than they do when they are in front of their peers. Read lots of children’s fiction yourself (which I’m sure most teachers and librarians mostly do) so you can recommend the right book to the right child.
If you weren’t an author, what job would you love to do?
Er…a footballer? Failing that, a fighter pilot.
