Gleitzman to speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival

Beloved children’s storyteller Morris Gleitzman’s new novel Tweet is about the epic adventure of Jay, an 11-year-old boy, and his budgie Clyde in a world that is suddenly filled with mysterious bird behaviour.

The boy’s parents are globally admired bird scientists who go missing on a field trip to Africa. As Jay and Clyde take steps to find them, they get caught up in the mystery themselves. The story is told from the perspectives of both boy and budgie.

Speaking to The AJN, Gleitzman said that Tweet was inspired by listening to young readers express their thoughts and feelings about aspects of climate and the environment, and also from imagining the ways other species might react to these environmental changes, especially birds. Gleitzman will be speaking about Tweet at his appearance at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on May 26.

Gleitzman is a bestselling children’s author who has written more than 40 books and was the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2018 and 2019. He often tackles serious subjects for young readers. For example, his novel Once is about the Holocaust, which led to the sequels Then (2009), Now (2010), After (2012), Soon (2015) Maybe (2017), and Always (2021).

Regarding writing a novel for children about the Holocaust, Gleitzman said, “One part of my family was Jewish, and this was something I was interested to explore on a personal level.”

Gleitzman’s grandfather was a Jew from Poland who left before the Holocaust and moved to England, but many members of his family were killed by the Nazis.

“I knew most of my young readers, other than those growing up in Jewish families and Jewish communities, probably wouldn’t know much about the Holocaust, so reading the book would be a journey of discovery,” Gleitzman said about his novel Once.

“This would work best, I decided, if they travel with a character who is making his own journey of discovery. Felix is Jewish, but when he was quite young he was hidden in a Catholic orphanage by his parents who saw what was happening in the late 1930s and just wanted to hide him away.”

Gleitzman said that for many years he wrestled with the words of author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who pleaded, “If you weren’t there, don’t write about it.”

But 70 years since the Holocaust, “I finally found the possibility of giving myself permission to not obey that instruction,” said Gleitzman.

“Because I wanted to offer the young people who read my books the chance to know about this particular and hugely important time in world history.”

Gleitzman sometimes places the best and the worst that humans are capable of side-by-side in his stories. “Young readers are starting to lay the foundations of their personal moral landscape … and they are looking around the world for the first time, no longer relying entirely on information and opinions from the loving adults around them,” he said.

“They’re developing their own thoughts and their own sense of how things are and how they feel about it.”

Tweet is published by Penguin and is available now.

To book tickets to “In Conversation with Morris Gleitzman” at the Sydney Writers’ Festival visit-swf.org.au/program/season-2024/in-conversation-with-morris-gleitzman