See Lives That Inspire : A Freewrite

Does it matter?If it does matter, make it vivid, make it matter. And I think if you can do that, you can grip anyone with essentially anything. Frank, do you think there's a difference between what the adults want and and what children want when it comes to biography?

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Oh, yeah, definitely. We've been talking this morning a lot about inspiration. And I think when you're a kid, you're looking into the future and you want to see lives that inspire and heroic.

And then sadly, when we get old, we want to know that our heroes have feet of clay. So I think the popular.These are the ones that go you'll never believe. Oh no, not really, right? And Catherine, it is obviously a way to explore the lives of heroes and heroines, as well as the the dastardly ones that Frank is talking about.Absolutely. I think you you can make children, especially if you're writing for older kids. You can make them see the complexities of their heroes and thereby realize perhaps that route might be there for them. Can we talk then? The books themselves, the biographies that are on your list?Frank, we talk about biographies for children first of all, that you've thought about. Yeah, I've got, I've chosen Catherine Dunphin's Queen of Freedom. And Catherine Johnson is a brilliant writer. She's a great storyteller.

And she's got a whole host of these short, very nippy, very punchy, very exciting biographies of people that you.You know, if you may have neglected so Matthew Henson that the polar explorer, but I've gone for Queen of Freedom, which is about Queen Nanny who led led a slave rebellion in Jamaica in the 18th century.

She sort of tried to found a utopian community. She's a brilliant guerrilla fighter.Just a completely extraordinary figure that you probably didn't know about Catherine Johnson as as a talent for picking these figures out.