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Curious Creatures, Wild Minds with Kate & Jol Temple

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Over here at Scribblers HQ we are super excited to explore ‘Curious Creatures, Wild Minds’ as we launch into CBCA Book Week 2020! What kind of curious creatures do you like to read about? Are there any wild minds out there who make up your favourite characters, or storytellers?

Book Week is the perfect time to get creative, dress up, and share your love of stories with your family, friends and community.  

Kate & Jol Temple love writing silly books for kids. In fact, they have just released their latest story, The Battle Of Book Week. We caught up with Kate and Jol to find out about their favourite curious creatures…

 

What does this year’s CBCA Book Week theme Curious Creatures, Wild Minds mean to you?

What a great theme it is this year! For us books are all about sparking wild minds and letting your imagination run free. Curious Creatures are the weird and wonderful characters that inhabit these wild places. Looking forward to seeing the book parade costumes for this one!

Name your favourite curious creature – either one you’ve created or read about. What do you love about them?

Mr and Mrs Twit from Roald Dahl's The Twits. Now those two sure are curious creatures... pretty rotten, stinking, reprehensible, grotesque curious creatures! I just love how terrible they are! As for curious creatures that we have created I'll have to say the BIN CHICKEN is my pick. That is certainly a very curious creature. We simultaneously hate and love them. On one hand they are a bit gross as they wade through our rubbish but on the other hand they are native birds that are surviving and adapting to a habitat that has changed on them.

How will you be celebrating CBCA Book Week this October?

We have a great Book Week planned for 2020. We will be out on the Sydney Writers'Festival bus called Russ the Story Bus visiting schools and talking to kids about all our curious creatures!

 

We wanted to know a little more about Kate & Jol to so we asked a few more questions about them…

Describe yourself in a sentence.

I love writing books, reading books and playing the piano with my nose.

What do you love most about writing for children?

Kids are the best readers. They engage with characters and stories and they are great judges of character... they know when a book is awesome and they'll stick with it. It's also great after we've written the books because we get to meet our readers at school visits or festivals and that's always stacks of fun. They always ask interesting questions and they don't mind doing the cat dance with us.

2020 has been a year of much change and uncertainty – can you tell us a bit about what the year has held for you in terms of your creativity and work?

It has be a tricky year for everyone and some of it was hard and some of it was great. The best part for us is we got to work on a new series that's coming out next year. It's so great seeing a book come together, we love working with illustrators and seeing how they bring our ideas to life and add heaps of new angles to the story. Can't wait to share this next year!

 

Follow Kate & Jol Temple on Facebook and Instagram to find out more about their Book Week adventures and tune in to our Conversation Caravan Podcast to hear more Kate & Jol stories!