WELLINGTON author Fleur Beale recently caught a piranha.
She and her daughter holidayed in Brazil for a month, and travelled to the Amazonian basin.
“I can now say I’ve swum in the Amazon River and gone fishing for piranhas,” she laughs. “There are three different sorts of piranha, apparently it’s the black ones you have to be wary of. Mine was a white one, but the guy still took it off the hooks very carefully.”
Beale’s trip to Brazil, “an astonishing and amazing place” was part of the inspiration for her latest book, which is a finalist in the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards.
End of The Alphabet, nominated in the Young Adult Fiction section, is Beale’s book about a teenage girl called Ruby, who has a learning disability and dreams of travelling to Brazil on a school exchange.
“I’ve always been interested in kids who struggle with reading,” says Beale. “Ruby thinks she’s dumb, but she’s very intelligent.”
Many of Beale’s books follow teenagers trying to overcome a problem, although “I don’t ever set out to write issues books, because it can dominate the story”.
But as a former high school teacher in the 1980s, Beale noticed there were very few books published for teenagers, so she thought she’d write one herself.
The result was Slide the Corner, which is still in print and is about to be re-printed for another run.
Beale has had 28 book published in New Zealand, with some of them also being published in Australia, the US and England.
“I think it’s important for Kiwi kids to read something relative to them, and that’s why I started writing really. It’s great to have the exposure of the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards to say ‘hey look, we have a vibrant writing scene here’,” Beale says.
She also admits that writing is “a bit of an addiction”.
“After I finish a book I go around grumping and saying ‘what should I write next?’ There’s no escape once you start,” she laughs.
Beale is now in the process of editing another book, her sequel to award-winning Juno of Taris, and has got ideas for the third of the series “floating around in my head”.
Winners of the New Zealand Post Book Awards will be announced on May 19.
Visit www.nzpostbookawards.co.nz for a full list of finalists.