The Livings of Leyla

  In the Cheltenham Literature Festival, I met a children’s author named Kathrine Rundell. She explained how she had faced many adventures caused by her books. One of her books -‘The Explorer’-  was set in a rainforest and it was about kids who had crashed in a helicopter . She explained how she was inspired to write this book, because she had went to the Amazon rainforest. She also stated that if she wanted to make her stories sound real, she had to try the things in real life, especially the food. In her book, the characters ate piranhas so she decided to try them, she said they tasted like chicken and they were easy to catch.  She also wanted to try Tarantulas, like the people in her book. The person who was catching them for her told her they were like gerbils, that lowered her enthusiasm to eat one of those hairy eight legged creatures even more. So instead of trying one she decided to ask the people who lived in the Amazon. They said it tasted like prawn and soft me...

  Cheltenham-Literature Festival. Last weekend, October 8th, we discovered a new town: We ate Sri Lankan food for the first time and had posh English tea. But the reason we came was because of the literature festival that was held annually.  At Cheltenham Festival, we met a man called Karl Ove Knausgård, a famous author from Norway - the place I had lived in for several years.  He read out a " self-rejected”  segment of his book -‘Morning Star’- which was about a nineteen year old boy with a dead father, ill mother and a younger brother. He read a scene of a nineteen year old at a night. Apparently, this was the piece which stopped him from publishing his novel. Eight or even ten years later, he read it over again and realised this was a great piece of work. He decided to work on it more and finally published it as his first major novel a fter his book series of four. Speaking about his autobiographies, all four books in the series are called “My struggles” parts one...