An excited crowd of booksellers, reviewers, teachers, librarians and teenagers gathered last night in Farringdon’s Free Word Centre for the much-anticipated first Undercover event.
The evening involved a panel made up of four of our Undercover authors:
Martyn Bedford
Peter Cocks
Michelle Gayle
Mal Peet
The evening was co-organised in association with Live! Magazine, London’s biggest youth-run magazine who we have worked in partnership with for the Undercover campaign and who kindly provided us with the utterly brilliant 18 year-old chair Celeste.
Our very own Ruth kicked off the event, letting everyone know our reasons behind creating Undercover - to group our utterly engaging teen books under one banner - whether an action-packed thriller, a rip-roaring adventure or the love story of a lifetime. She then handed over to Celeste to introduce our authors, telling everyone a little bit about their writing history and latest book, and then we kicked off with screenings of the fantastic trailers for Long Reach, Flip, Pride and Premiership and the first public screening of the new Life: An Exploded Diagram trailer, which we're going to be unveiling to the rest of the world exclusively on Wondrous Reads this friday!
Celeste chaired a dynamic and inspiring debate engaging all four authors in discussions about censorship, writing approaches, the digital market and invited the audience to address the panel with questions. The event concluded with four young and incredibly talented spoken word artists who performed powerful poetry inspired by the Undercover books.
Below are a few pictures from the event!
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| The panel deep in discussion. From the left: Celeste, Michelle Gayle, Peter Cocks, Mal Peet & Martyn Bedford |
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| Martyn Bedford signing Flip and, in the background, Mal Peet signing copies of Life: An Exploded Diagram |
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| Michelle Gayle signs a copy of Pride and Premiership |
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| Peter Cocks with two of the young poets who performed during the evening |
We were really aiming for something a bit different to with this event and have had some great feedback from some of the attendees.
“It was a really great event, thanks so much. Really fun and lively, great authors and the young people were fantastic. I was sitting with Michelle Pauli and we were both really blown away by their poetry.”
Katherine Woodfine, Booktrust
“We really enjoyed it – and were most impressed by how well-behaved most of those kids were! I think they fidgeted less than us. We loved Mal Peet’s determined resolution not to get on down with the kids... Do you know who the Willesden poet was that performed after the discussion. He was AMAZING....” Dinah Hall, The Telegraph
“I just wanted to follow up after the success of last night's event and say - on behalf of everyone here at Live - thank you so much for letting us be involved! Everyone had a great experience and is fired up to do something like this again. Your mentorship was amazing, and I'm sure you'll be hearing from the team about the various things you all discussed.” Andrea Gamson, Live! Magazine
A podcast will be produced by The Guardian Online kids website about the event, and the Undercover team also filmed and recorded the event, which we'll put up on the blog in the next week or so...
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