ONs IN PRINT
David Friswell, Year 8, introducing Leo Hunt to his year group in April at the school’s author event
The Facts of Fiction By Leo Hunt (02-07) I wrote some of my first short stories as a student at RGS. I have a clear memory of the hardback English exercise books I wrote them in, by hand, and an equally clear memory of my thrill at being asked to read one out at the front of our class; the tale of a fearsome cat-like alien that had crash-landed on Earth and proceeded to menace the foolish people who gathered around the impact crater. Even then, I knew I wanted to become an author.
6
M
ore than a decade later, I make my living writing fiction for Young Adults, a demographic we describe as covering the ages of 11 and up, since a surprising proportion of readers are fully-fledged adults. I began work on my first published novel, Thirteen Days of Midnight in 2010, my first year of university. I was 19 years old, and didn’t feel like I understood adult life well enough to write a novel about it, but I did remember very clearly what I had enjoyed when I was 15 or so (monsters, magic, adventure) and I thought I had a reasonable shot at writing a story my younger self would have enjoyed.
