Award-winning children’s writer Onjali Q Raúf, whose The Boy At The Back of the Class was a huge hit at Chichester Festival Theatre earlier this year, is a guest at this year’s Chichester Children’s Book Festival.
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. It's lovely
00:06this afternoon to speak to Anjeli Ralph, who is heading to Chichester for the Chichester
00:11Children's Book Festival, and she'll be doing a couple of visits to a couple of our schools
00:15in October. And you love going into schools, don't you?
00:21I absolutely do, and I often have Snowy accompanying me. So, Snowy and I absolutely
00:26adore going into schools. We love to meet the children who have read the books,
00:31and who are learning about the books as well, so lots of them won't have read the books just yet.
00:36But yeah, just to see them interacting with myself, with the idea of the characters,
00:40and also their questions are absolutely golden. I absolutely love hearing their questions.
00:46And it's lovely the way you talk about the children, because you sense their hope,
00:50don't you, and their innocence, which sadly gets lost, doesn't it, sometimes as we grow up?
00:56Sometimes, yeah. So, this amazing hope that children carry around with them, and this
01:01clarity, this clarity as to justice, it's very much linked to their hope of how the world is
01:06going to be. It's such a beautiful thing to witness, and it's the thing that keeps me energised,
01:10it's the thing that keeps me going. And it's why I do as many schools as I do. I absolutely love
01:15seeing children lit up with that kind of magic, that stardust of hope that they carry around with
01:21them. And then, you know, kind of taking that feeling away from myself.
01:25Absolutely. And let's say you do give plenty of stardust yourself. The boy at the back of
01:29the class we had at Chichester Festival Theatre earlier this year, it was fantastic. I think we
01:35all walked out of the theatre on an absolute high. You must have been so pleased with the
01:40stage adaptation that you had there. I was absolutely blown away by what
01:46Nicka had, who wrote the script, did for the play, and how he interpreted the book,
01:51and the way Rose Theatre brought it to life. It was just absolutely stunning, and really surreal.
01:55I think I spent most of my time in the audiences when I could go to see it, thinking,
01:59how is this happening? It's beautiful to see the words you've written so many years ago coming out
02:04from actors' mouths, and having that experience of seeing audiences react to them. It's really
02:09surreal and beautiful. I'm so proud of the whole team.
02:12And it was a production that really did capture the hope that the children have,
02:16that you were talking about. Yes, absolutely. I think there's one thing
02:21that was really special to me. At the end of most of the runs, what I would do is bump into
02:26audience members who noticed me from the back of the book, or would know what I look like,
02:30and come up to me and say, I want to be just like the main character. I want to be just like Ahmed.
02:35I want to be like Josie and Michael. So they can really identify with children on the stage
02:42who linked in with their own sense of, what can I do to make things better? And I'm going to be
02:48able to do that now. So that was so beautiful to see. And to see them walking away, kind of
02:51skipping away with that feeling was beyond a dream. Fantastic. Well, I'm sure the children
02:57and the teachers at schools will love seeing you. Fantastic to speak to you, and thank you.