Mem fox
Mem Fox was born in Australia, grew up in Africa, studied drama in England, and returned to Adelaide, Australia in 1970, where she has lived with her husband, Malcolm, and daughter Chloë, happily ever after.
Mem Fox is Australia’s most highly regarded picture-book author. Her first book, Possum Magic, is the best selling children’s book ever in Australia, with sales of over three million. And in the USA Time for Bed and Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge have each sold over a million copies. Time for Bed is on Oprah’s list of the twenty best children’s books of all time. Mem has written thirty picture books for children and five non-fiction books for adults, including the best-selling Reading Magic, aimed at parents of very young children.
Mem Fox was an Associate Professor in Literacy Studies at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, where she taught teachers for twenty four years until her early retirement in 1996. She has received many civic awards, honours and accolades in Australia, including two honorary doctorates. She has visited the United States over one hundred times, mostly in her role as a literacy expert although she is also a well-known author in America. She is an influential international consultant in literacy, but she pretends to sit around writing full time.
Winner of the Dromkeen Medal (1990).
“The ideal three stories a day are one favorite, one familiar, and one new, but the same book three times is also fine.”
“The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn’t achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who’s reading aloud—it’s the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony.”
“As adults we choose our own reading material. Depending on our moods and needs we might read the newspaper, a blockbuster novel, an academic article, a women's magazine, a comic, a children's book, or the latest book that just about everyone is reading. No one chastises us for our choice. No one says, 'That's too short for you to read.' No one says, 'That's too easy for you, put it back.' No one says 'You couldn't read that if you tried -- it's much too difficult.'Yet if we take a peek into classrooms, libraries, and bookshops we will notice that children's choices are often mocked, censured, and denied as valid by idiotic, interfering teachers, librarians, and parents. Choice is a personal matter that changes with experience, changes with mood, and changes with need. We should let it be.”
“When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.”
“Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.”
“Books don't harm kids; they arm them.”