posted on 09 Sep 2020

An Interview with Patricia Forde

The Letterpress Project has asked authors and illustrators to think about what has inspired them as artists, what their favourite books are and how they relate to their audience - we've also asked them if they themselves are book collectors.

We are delighted to present an exclusive interview with author, Patricia Forde. Patricia is from Galway, on the west coast of Ireland. She has published several picturebooks and written plays and several television series for children,  as well as three novels for children with Little Island Books. She has worked as a writer on both English and Irish language soap operas. In another life, she was a primary school teacher and the artistic director of Galway Arts Festival.

Her first novel The Wordsmith (published in North America as The List) was published to great critical acclaim in 2015. It has since been published in the United States, Australia, Denmark, Russia, Turkey, Lithuania and the Netherlands. It won a White Raven Award from the International Youth Library, is an American Library Association Notable Book for Children in the United States, and was shortlisted for the Children’s Book of the Year Award in Ireland.

Bumpfizzle the Best on Planet Earth was chosen as the Dublin UNESCO Citywide Read 2019, and won a White Raven award. Mother Tongue, the sequel to The Wordsmith, was published in October 2019. She will publish a picturebook, Fidget the Wonder Dog, with Puffin in spring 2020.

Patricia is married to Padraic and has two grown up children. She still lives in Galway, her favourite city in the world. You can visit her website here

You can see what she had to tell us on this link to her interview:

Patricia_LetterPress_Questions.pdf