Brookesia Blog

Welcome

September 11, 2009

Welcome to my website. My name is Nicola Davies and I write books for children, non-fiction ones (information) and fiction ones (stories). They are nearly always about animals or the natural world. Actually never mind the ‘nearly’ — nature always gets into my books somehow, even when I’m writing fiction (stories).

Nature is simply the most important thing to me, it has been all my life. I think that having contact with nature is essential for humans to be properly human. Without animals and plants, we humans would just die of loneliness.

I’ve called this blog brookesia, after a kind of teeny chameleon that I saw in a forest in Madagascar. When that little creature sat in the palm of my hand, with its little grippy feet, its downturned mouth and eyes on turrets and looked up at me, I was a million percent happy. And it’s that feeling of deep delight that I want to share with my readers.

I’m pretty keen that my readers get excited about science too. Science is often represented as a great big dollop of facts that you are supposed to learn, but that isn’t what it is at all. Science is never a finished thing, its a way of thinking about and investigating the world. Any idea in science can be changed if somebody – maybe you – comes up with a different theory that fits the facts more closely.

Sometimes, though, I want to talk to my readers about how humans feel about the natural world, and I do that with stories, and poems that are rooted in my experience of nature.

That’s nearly enough talk: it’s time for you to explore and try out some of the bits of my books that are on this site. But before you go off, there are just a few more things I need to tell you.

One is that almost the best part of being a writer for children is that you get to work with children, and I do lots of that. If you’d like to know more about this click here. If you’d like me to come and visit your school details of how to do that and how to contact me are here. If you’d like to try out my new ‘Whale Tail’s Story’ workshop combining whale biology, artwork and writing click here for more information.

The second thing is that I teach on the MA in Creative Writing For Young People at Bath Spa University College. I used to do this a lot , but now I only do a tiny little bit. This course is run by my friends, Julia Green helped by Steve Voake. They’ve done such a fabulous job that several of our ex-students are being published and winning prizes, you might already have read some of their books: Marie Louise Jensen, Sally Nicholls, CJ Skuse. More names are being added to this list all the time.

And the third thing is about my new book about climate change, called Gaia Warriors .Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s about climate change. It isn’t a gloomy book, and it’s full of stuff we can do to start building a better future. Check it out.

That’s it! Happy exploring.