The pen and the wand

To kick off 10 pages of children's books for Christmas, a profile of Margaret Mahy, sorceress of storytelling.

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20th December, 2008

A few years ago, during a colloquium held by Canterbury Public Library to mark Margaret Mahy's 70th birthday, David Hill told a funny story to illustrate his sense of Mahy's influence on children's writers in New Zealand. Though his writing was, he conceded, very different from Mahy's, he had been affected by her peculiarly alert way of looking at the world, particularly at the mad, slippery life of language. Once, in a motel room, a sign on a door caught his eye: "This door is alarmed." Mahy would like that, thought Hill. She would enjoy the comedy just beneath the surface of ...

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