Meeting with two British writers

PBBY Meeting with the writers Anthony Robinson & Annemarie Young

Date : 20/05/2013

PBBY hosted in cooperation with Tamer Institute the writers Anthony Robinson and Annemarie Young who talked about their experience in writing stories for children in crisis situations.

Anthony Robinson and Annemarie were introduced by Samar Qutob who gave a briefing about their work as researchers and story writers for children; both are interested in children around the world who live in difficult conditions. Samar added that both Annemarie a Anthony were teachers.

Then Annmarie talked about their books:

Gervelie’s Journey: a Refugee Diary: a story about a refugee from Congo Republic
Mohammad’s Journey: a story about Muhammad who is from a Kurdish Family from Iraq.

Meltem’s Journey: a story about a little girl from Turkey

Each of these stories consists of 32 pages is real story about real children ages between 8-12 years. Before writing the story the writers met and interviewed the children and wrote the stories on behalf of the children who narrated their stories.

Anthony Robinson talked about a 48 pages story “Street Children” about the life of children from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Guatemala.

The writers explained that the reason for their visit is to the Palestinian Occupied Territory is to write a story about Palestinian children “Palestinian Children’s Voices”. They will tour the cities towns and Palestinian Refugees Camps to meet with children and collect data before writing the story.

During the last London Book Fair in the Cambridge literature section, both Annemarie Young and Anthony Robinson held a workshop to talk about the three mentioned stories. 25 children with their parents p participated in the workshop. They presented the stories by acting . The Children were distributed into groups each group was given few questions to discuss. The workshop was very successful it highlighted the lives of children living under crisis.

Afterwards the floor was opened for discussion. The participants gave ideas and suggestions about conducting interviews to collect information about Palestinian children.

The meeting was successful and dynamic.