Homeward Bound

How strong hometown ties have helped bring success to a Hebden Bridge author.

- Jo Haywood

LIZ Flanagan has a childhood illness to thank for her love of books. She had glandular fever when she was eight and was kept at home for six weeks, missing her friends at Riverside School in Hebden Bridge and staring glassy-eyed at the ceiling. Until…

‘Mum brought me lots of books from the library,’ she said. ‘And I mean lots. I can honestly say I came out of my illness a bookworm.

‘We didn’t have the choice we have now, but I still have to say a very big thank you to Hebden Bridge library. I can remember my little cardboard library card so clearly. It opened up a new world – numerous worlds – to me as I worked my way along the shelves from the Famous Five to Rosemary Sutcliff, Susan Cooper, Robert Swindells and Margaret Mahy.’

Liz is in pretty good company when it comes to authors who came to books through illness. Bram Stoker was bedridden with a mysterious illness until the age of seven. HG Wells was laid up for months aged eight after being thrown from a horse. Robert Louis Stevenson, whose lungs were weakened by a genetic flaw, spent most of his childhood at home being tended by a nurse. And all of them credited their enforced exclusion from life for their love of the written word.

For Liz, it’s a love that has continued into adulthood. After completing an English degree at Sussex, she joined the publishing industry in London and, later, Brighton, working for Walker, Macmillan and Barefoot Books. She began by answering the telephones but, after moving into the children’s department, took on editing duties, provided the odd sentence or two for picture books and, finally, was commissioned to write a series of early readers.

‘That’s when I first saw my name on a cover,’ she said. ‘I’d always loved writing, but that was what gave me the confidence to start pursuing it seriously.’