Gill Arbuthnott: Children's Author

MANDATORY CREDIT: PIC – ROB MCDOUGALL http://www.RobMcDougall.com 07856222103 info@robmcdougall.com

I was born and brought up in Edinburgh, where I went to James Gillespie’s High School, famous as the school where the author Muriel Spark was educated, and on which she based her most famous book The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Almost all the teachers when I was there seemed to be wildly eccentric spinsters, including one maths teacher who would climb onto a chair and disappear into a cupboard at one end of the room, and reappear out from a cupboard door at the other end, having crawled her way through. Then there was Miss Dalgliesh. She was my teacher in Primary 5. She always wore a black teaching gown, and used to swoop round the room like a large, friendly rook. She had a stuffed tawny owl in her room, and if you were particularly good, you might be allowed to take it home for the weekend. She used to invite some of us (we were all girls in Gillespie’s back then) to the flat she shared with her sister, to eat cream cakes and listen to her sister play the piano… I don’t think they make teachers like that any more, sadly, though I’ve done my best to keep up the great tradition of eccentricity in which I was raised.

When I finished school I went off to St Andrew’s University to study Zoology, then did teacher training (just so I could have another year lolling around as a student, really). At that point, I thought I wanted to be a Proper Scientist, so I went off to Southampton University to start a PhD. Unfortunately, I was rubbish at research. I wasn’t nearly clever enough. So I became a Biology teacher instead!

All the time though, what I really wanted to do was write. I wrote in secret (I know, how sad is that?) so that not even my family knew my Dark Secret. I tried a couple of books for adults, but just amassed  a splendid collection of rejection slips. Then I saw the Millennium Clock in the museum in Edinburgh, and suddenly I was writing The Chaos Clock, and suddenly it had turned into a childrens’ book. I still don’t quite know how that happened. It seemed to just decide it was a childrens’ book, and I didn’t feel I was in a position to argue with it.

Now, I can’t imagine why I ever wanted to write for adults. This has got to be the best job in the world…

Since writing The Chaos Clock, I’ve written picture books, children’s novels, teen novels and children’s science books. You can find out about all of them on the Books page.

And now, I’ve finally given up teaching – after what feels like about 832 years – to write full time, so this is the start of an exciting new chapter in my own life.