Content area
Full Text
The Australian Children's Laureates, Boori Monty Pryor and Alison Lester will host a series of workshops on the theme of storytelling at the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast and The Verbal Arts Centre in Londonderry on Monday and Tuesday.
Boori and Alison, who are considered to be world leaders in the field of children's literacy, are being brought to the province by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland with the aim of instilling a love of stories, storytelling and the arts in young people.
Research has shown that children perform better academically, socially and creatively if exposed to books at a young age.
To mark the visit we asked a number of local personalities to tell us about their favourite book as a child and why it had captured their imagination.
Marie-Louise Muir is a BBC presenter living in Belfast with husband Johnny and girls Catherine (7) and Rebecca (4). Favourite book: Dr Seuss's Sleep Book, Dr Seuss She says: "I read this a lot to my five-year-old and we both love its total eccentricity. It was written in 1962 but it is a really timeless story. When you're reading names of creatures like the Foona Lagoona Baboona, the Chippendale Mupp, and the Krandles and a small bug called Van Vleck, coupled with the signature strange Seuss drawings, it's hard not to get sucked into this really fantastical world. It starts off with Van Vleck yawning, the yawn spreads and by the end of it, everyone in the book, and me included, are yawning their heads off. The final line is simply "Good Night". It is glorious. I'm fast asleep before my daughter!" Sheena Wilkinson (44) is an author of children's books and lives in Castlewellan Favourite book: Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild She says: "I read voraciously as a child and still do, so it's hard to pick just one but I've gone for Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes. The atmosphere of 1930s London, the mixture of glamour and grit, the strong, flawed, very human characters, but above all the seriousness with which Streatfeild takes the children's concerns made Ballet Shoes stand head and shoulders above its contemporaries in 1936 and still strike the reader today. I read the Fossil family's adventures with...