Posted by By Sarah Hardstaff, photos copyright Siddharth Pandey
In my last blog post (here), I mentioned the HorseTales Conference organised by Zoe Jaques, Georgie Horrell and Sabine Edwards that took place at Homerton on Saturday 21st May.
The conference was a great success, with an impressive line-up of authors and academics from as far afield as New Zealand sharing their love and knowledge of horse stories. Fellow PhD-ers Maggie Meimaridi and Phoebe Chen were among the speakers, along with Cambridge’s very own Maria Nikolajeva, David Whitley and Melanie Keene. The personal highlight of the day for me was speaking on the same panel as Georgie, my MPhil thesis supervisor.
Marilyn of the Norfolk Children’s Book Centre pulled out all the stops to bring us a remarkable bookshop – I’ve never seen so many pony books in one place. I was a little worried at one point that the book covers could come to life and we would be overrun by a stampede of tiny paper ponies. Luckily the number of books decreased rapidly throughout the day as the ponies were adopted by happy delegates.
For a full report on the event, see the series of blog posts written by Jane Badger, one of the morning’s roundtable speakers:
- Conference Report Part One
- Conference Report Part Two
- Conference Report Part Three
- Jane’s Talk (full text)
Jane is the author of ‘Heroines on Horseback’, and runs a website dedicated to pony and horse fiction at janebadgerbooks.co.uk which is well worth a visit – just make sure you’ve cleared your schedule for the day beforehand.
Siddharth Pandey was also on hand with his ubiquitous camera to document the day:
2016 ALMA Laureate Meg Rosoff and prolific children’s author KM Peyton
Together again! Georgie and I listen to fellow panelist Jenny Kendrick, from Roehampton
Children's Literature at Cambridge 