Morris Gleitzman
Morris Gleitzman
Morris Gleitzmanis an English-born Australian author of children's and young adult fiction. He has gained recognition for sparking an interest in AIDS in his controversial novel Two Weeks with the Queen...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth9 January 1953
type
Melbourne is my type of city, much more so than Sydney.
biggest people stories type
The type of stories I write are about young people grappling with the biggest problems in their lives, often problems that are bigger than they're actually capable of solving.
good kids outcome time
Kids who are nine, 10 and 11 are pretty sophisticated readers; they know that there isn't always a good outcome every time and that problems don't always have solutions.
dismissed
Kid's culture is often dismissed as superficial, like high fibre McDonald's, but it's so much more important than that.
develop grounding kids might
Kids aren't political, but around 10 years old, they are beginning to develop the moral grounding that might later, in their teens, develop into their first real political perspectives.
deeply enjoyed found kid kids realised stories until wrote
I wrote stories as a kid just for myself. One day, some of the kids in my class found some of my stories in my bag, and I was deeply embarrassed until I realised they enjoyed reading them.
capacity entertain largely liked people
My capacity for humour may have come largely from my father - he liked to entertain people, make people laugh.
bit break exciting families kids less presents trauma
Step-parenting and being a step-sibling presents a lot of exciting opportunities. When families break up and re-form, there may be less order, less certainty, and a bit more trauma involved, but kids can end up having half-a-dozen parent figures.
beneath caught moved
If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.
closer discovered feelings
I discovered you can get closer to a character's thoughts and feelings in a book than in a film.
fearless halfway humour learned maybe physically prevail primary punch quickly realised situations somebody trying using worked
Halfway through primary school, I realised that I was not as physically strong or fearless as many kids. So, in situations of conflict, I quickly learned that it worked better for me to get out of situations or maybe kind of, you know, prevail in a conflict situation by using humour than by trying to punch somebody out.
images places scary stories
Boys, particularly, like stories where they can have images in their imagination, where they can go to scary places and experiment with what can happen.
consequences either life reproduce seeking
Most of your life after puberty, you're either seeking to reproduce or living with the consequences of having done so. At 70, you start going back to being 11 again.
facing realised sentence soon stuck trying
I used to get stuck trying to find the first sentence of a story, then I realised that it was often because I didn't know what problem a character was facing in the story. As soon as I did, I could have the character trying to do something about it or have the problem whack him between the eyes.