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What inspired you to write your book?
I didn’t set out to write animal stories for children – it just happened. The first book I ever finished was Kiwi in Cat City in 2002. I had been made redundant and suddenly had a lot of time on my hands.

The story was inspired by a little black, fluffy, golden-eyed, chubby cat that I used to have, called Kiwi. She was cheeky, intelligent, curious, and liked to follow me down the road on the way to work – I’d have to scoop her up, take her back and run off! I’m sure she’d have hopped on the train with me if she could. Kiwi liked to chase shadows on walls, munch Whiskers food, roll on her back with her paws in the air for strokes, and hunt birds (alas, she was very good, and it was the only thing we argued about). When she wasn’t trying to swipe the dinner off my plate when I wasn’t looking or jumping in the air to catch a moth in mid-flight, she’d be curled up on my bed or waiting to pouncing out at me. One day she followed me to the supermarket round the corner, waited patiently on a wall, and then came back home with me.

Kiwi was lovely, but I lost her in 2000, when she was six, which is no age really. I started to really hate cars!!

When Kiwi was still alive, I wrote a poem about her. In 2002, during this time between jobs, I reread it and started thinking about a world populated by cats. I’d lie in bed at night, imagining it. They ran their own lives and did their own thing. I named this world Cat City, where cats roamed free and happy, away from the dangers posed by cars and dogs, and where it was always summer. The star would be Kiwi. I would bring her back to life on paper and make her go on adventures. In Kiwi in Cat City, the cat heroine is four, and she is ‘owned’ by Amy and James, and their parents, in the human world. I ended up making Amy a bit like me, although I named her after my niece. James was just my favourite boy’s name.

Gradually, other characters started talking and a catnapping plot emerged. I had no idea where the book was going, but I was having a lot of fun. I wrote every day. Kiwi became magical and able to communicate with the kids, whom she turned into kittens and took on an adventure to her other home – the blue-lit Cat City. Soon other characters evolved – Siam, a computer whizz with bent whiskers, Inspector Furrball, a ginger tom with a very red waistcoat, and Kip, a good friend of Kiwi’s, among others. Plus there had to be a bad cat and a few red herrings.

Why animals? All my life I’ve always been crazy about them. They make me go “Ahhhhhh!” When I was a child I wanted to be able to talk to our pets. Our house was full of them – my mum ran a mini zoo and it was magical to me. One of my best-est buddies at the age of six or seven was our cat Mitzi, who I talked to and was sure she understood. My dad had an aviary full of birds and I thought I could communicate with them by winking. I’d go into the aviary, hold out my two little hands full of bird seed, and the budgies would land to feed. They’d also hop on my shoulder to do the winking thing. So, in Kiwi in Cat City, I made the kitty communicate with the two children – my wish from childhood.

Genre and Targeted Age Group
Middle grade fiction

About your Book:
One dark night, Amy cannot sleep. She looks out of the window into the garden to see her cat, Kiwi, transfixed by the moon, which is glowing brightly like a cat’s claw. Waking her brother, James, the girl suggests they follow Kiwi to see where she goes… whether it involves a hunt for mice or something else. Little do they know that, with a flick of her tail, Kiwi is going to magically change them into kittens and lead them on the adventure of their lives to a world inhabited by catizens. In the blue-lit world of Cat City, the budding detectives help Inspector Furrball to investigate a catnapping and find out what happened to Madame Purrfect.

This book is the first in the Kiwi Series, of which there are six books.

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