Interview: Sally Nicholls

Jonathan Doering talks to children’s author Sally Nicholls about her writing and her Quakerism

by Jonathan Doering 23rd November 2017

‘Kids love death and killing! They like the edges,’ says Sally Nicholls, the award-winning children’s author who is now based in Oxford. Born into a Quaker family in Stockton-on-Tees, she has been a lifelong storyteller. Her life connects the wider world with Quakerism: after Great Ayton School she attended a state sixth form college before spending six months working with the Japanese Red Cross. She then studied Literature and Philosophy at Warwick University before taking an MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University. The potentially precarious writer’s life was not entered into lightly: ‘I took the decision to a Quaker Meeting.’