Sweep

"Sweep is very similar to Ruby’s Worry . It starts with a small worry that becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. In Ruby’s Worry , you have this cloud over her head or sitting on her shoulder. Sweep is in an autumn book with the anxiety visualized by the illustrator, Julia Sarda, as leaves. As the worry gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you get big emotions and a huge pile of leaves that you can’t deal with anymore. The book was nominated for the Kate Greenway Medal, as well as being shortlisted for the Klaus Flugge and the Waterstones Prize. I think a lot of parents are now talking to children about anxiety and worries. Some people now say the millennials are the most anxious generation of all. A lot of it has to do with social media, and all the anxieties coming from peer pressure and dealing with bullies online. These things don’t go away because they invade your home now through your phone. So there are a lot more books now dealing with anxiety. Yes, as a storyteller, I get more out of the telling of the story than from the writing. I don’t ever read books (even my own) when I perform: I always tell the story. Because it always changes based on who your audience is and I realised that I can break it down in a different way. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Even though You’re Safe with Me is an original story, I wanted it to have a folktale feel. I wanted to have a storyteller or a mother figure in the story who was necessarily not the mum of these animals, but a matronly figure who could help with the handling of the anxiety or the fear. That is how we grew up. We had my grandmother and my grandmother’s sister and lots of different people in the house. We were a joint family. I wanted that feeling to come through in the book, as if it’s different children from different backgrounds all in the same story. The four animals are Indian animals but they’re not necessarily animals that would live together. But they are listening to this story together and questioning it together. It works really well in a classroom because teachers realise it brings together children from different areas, and backgrounds. They’re all having different types of anxieties or fears and this one person can bring them all together. That’s probably the strength of a picture book, that it can go into those layers and children discover them. For example, if I tell the story in a school setting, I always point out that it talks about the water cycle because you get rains and the water goes to the river. The river goes to the ocean and then comes back as rain."