Authors
You could say my childhood was a little different from most. Until I was eleven, I lived in a boys-only boarding school. When I went to a girls’ boarding school, they were strangely unimpressed by my tree-climbing and weapon-making skills.
I became a teacher, but all the time I was trying to be a writer. It took me many years to get published, but now I write books full-time (when I’m not doing school talks or festivals throughout the UK and in Europe). I’ve won some awards, including the Scottish Arts Council Children’s Book of the Year Award for Sleepwalking, and I was shortlisted for the Aventis Science Prize for Blame My Brain. I‘m also proud of having invented Brain CakeTM, designed to power your brain. (Recipe on my website!)
Edinburgh is now my home. Its streets, history and people often inspire my work, such as the gory Fleshmarket and my next novel, Deathwatch, about a girl being stalked by an insect-collector. Be careful when you’re out and about in Edinburgh: you could end up in my next book …
Visit Nicola’s own website at www.nicolamorgan.co.uk
An extract from The Boy With No Name By Nicola Morgan
Jamie MacLeod had no name.
Not as far as his mother’s new husband was concerned.
‘Boy’, on a good day. ‘Sleekit rat’, or ‘useless, cow’ring, Godless runt’, on a bad day.
Today was a bad day. The air in Edinburgh too hot to breathe, the stench from rot-strewn streets, skin sticky with sweat – everyone tired and tempers short. And now Jamie had made his stepfather angry – he could see it in his narrowed eyes, the creases on his sheeny forehead, the tightening of jaw muscles where his doctor’s collar pressed into his flesh.
Faster than Jamie could see, a hand lashed his face, and fury swarmed through his head like bees. In a corner sat his mother, her back straight in a new dress, her belly rigid and round with another baby, her eyes tight with fear, skin grey with her own pain. And silent.
Read the full story in Our City, available from Polygon in November 2008.
