Andy mulligan author biography search engine

Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info and giveaways by email. Join Member Login Patron Login. Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Most Anticipated Books of ! Andy Mulligan author biography, plus links to books by Andy Mulligan. Author Snapshot. More about membership! He now lives in England, and is writing full time.

The Ribblestrop trilogy is now complete: Ribblestrop, Forever! Brings closure to the series. Click here to read more. Trash is a very different animal.

Andy mulligan author biography search engine

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There, it's about survival and it's about getting the prize. In Liquidator, I'm looking at something so innocent and strong. What Liquidator does is so wrong and the children want to put it right and save the boy, Jamie, who has been caught up in all this. Q: What was it like having your book, Trash, filmed? Has it changed things for you as a writer?

A: The filming of Trash has certainly provided me with more opportunities. I came to writing quite late in my life and it has opened certain doors; people look at what you're doing with a little more interest. In contrast, when I started writing in my 20's, I remember having a radio play turned down at the last hurdle and being devastated by it.

I felt like I was on the other side of a door that I couldn't go through. A: I write a lot from my home in Chichester although I have discovered that if you hire a cottage somewhere nice and plan to get your first draft done while you're there, it's a great way to set a deadline so I often do that. I used to go to India a lot to write, I had a cheap little hotel in Mumbai that I'd stay in and the room I'd hire had an enormous desk under a ceiling fan.

I still do a fair bit of travelling, I'm going to visit a school in Egypt next month, in Cairo - they have Trash on their syllabus - and I'll be in the Philippines in December as they're doing one of my radio plays. I tend to do two or three school visits a month. A: At the moment I'm working on a play for Radio 4 about a guy who is trying to stage a play in a school and everything goes horribly wrong, there are accidents and misunderstandings and it's funny.

My next children's book is about a dog who has an identity crisis and thinks it is a cat. It's called 'Dog'. Return to Ribblestrop won The Guardian children's book award last month. We talked to author Andy Mulligan about what inspired the series about a group of pupils who run wild in their very eccentric school called Ribblestrop. A: I was walking with a friend in the grounds of a run-down stately home and I had just started as a teacher at a school where everything was very structured and time-tabled and I joked, 'let's buy this house and run it as a school', but we both agreed that if we ran a school it would be awful.

We'd have no regulations and we'd employ people who would never make it as a conventional teacher, and so the children who were sent to the school would be those who had been removed from other schools, or whose parents didnt care, or who were orphans. A: Where Ribblestrop works is that it goes with the enthusiasms of the teachers and students.

That's where education works. So in this story, you have a panther who is pregnant so science lessons move on that tangent and becomes lessons on birth and the world of animals. Another lesson becomes focused on how to build a roof, because the roof in the room has collapsed. So its entirely practical and relevant - education at its best.

A: I'm a very impatient teacher so I couldn't see myself in the Ribblestrop staffroom. Those teachers do have enormous patience and don't mind losing control a bit, which isn't me. At the moment I teach at an international school in Manila where there are 55 nationalities. It's very structured, nothing like Ribblestrop, and I love teaching there.

It means that I turn into a writer every Saturday morning and it's the same during the holidays, I set myself a very strict schedule and write for eight hours a day. A: There's a boy in the story called Miles who is suicidal for various reasons and he rips his own flesh with glass when he realises his best friends have rejected him and he decides life is not worth living and reacts against those who hurt him so deeply and badly.

Then the science teacher decides to make his injury the subject of a science lesson and the class has to watch as he shows his wounds being stitched up There is a lot of comedy in Ribblestrop, but it's also about redemption. The young people are constantly heading towards real discoveries about friendship and a deepening relationship between them.

After his experiences, Miles discovers an absolute thirst for life and that pulse goes through the whole of the book. A: Yes, the third book that I am writing is an outward bound story. The central gag is that a group of pupils are doing their Duke of Edinburgh expedition so for two or three nights will be orienteering even though they've not been taught how to do it and don't know how to survive on the moor by themselves A: I've always loved circuses and love the irreverence with which the children in Ribblestrop treat the circus animals.

They handle them and abuse them and learn to live right up close with them. The animals are ferocious but become quite attached to the children because they are so fearless of them. Of course it's a completely unrealistic situation but it gives room for a lot of gags. I love the one where the python eats someone's dog, and there's an elderly lion who treats one of the boys like its cub and the boy is always dripping with saliva from the lion licking him.

A: I had lost my job as a theatre director and happened to get a call from a friend saying they needed some help with a project in Calcutta, so I went to help out and became addicted to it. It was out of my comfort zone but I loved it. I realised that the way I'd been brought up to think isn't the only way. In places like Manila and India people have such different expectations of what the world can do for them, you need to completely re-evaluate how you look at the world and you're not sure which of your values will stay with you, and which will go.

Trash is set on a rubbish dump in an unnamed country, where children scavenge for scraps that they can sell to earn money for food. Since this is based on a reality experienced by many thousands of children, it is heartbreaking territory, but Mulligan's exploration of the children's enterprise and warmth, their thirst for justice and a powerful sense of community, also makes it a deeply sensitive and optimistic story.

It is also a very exciting one. The story is told through several different voices, including a young Western volunteer, Olivia; Father Guillard who is in charge of the dumpsite school at Behala; and three of the dumpsite children - Raphael, Gardo and Rat. Each describes their unfolding adventure in their own voice. The adventure begins when one of the children in Behala, Raphael, discovers a wallet on the dumpsite which contains money, a map and a key.

It soon becomes clear that the city's corrupt mayor will do anything to get hold of the wallet and its contents, but he proves no match for the dumpsite children who are determined to work out who owned the wallet and what its contents mean for the ordinary people of their town. In doing so, they put to right a terrible injustice from the past.

Mulligan began to write Trash after visiting a dumpsite on the outskirts of Manilla while he was working at a wealthy international school in Manilla. The international school had attached itself to an evangelically-run school at the dumpsite as part of a 'social agenda' to teach its pupils about the world.