KIERAN LARWOOD

Write Of The Lepus: meet a children’s author whose heroes are rabbits

- Jonathan Wright

BIODATA

From Born in Kenya, grew up mostly on the Isle Of Wight.

Greatest Hits The Five Realms series consists of five novels so far, with 2016’s The Legend Of Podkin One-Ear kicking off one trilogy, and 2019’s Uki And The Outcasts commencing another.

Random Fact Larwood has sold the TV rights to Podkin One-Ear to production company Shiny Button, which has been pitching a series. “Fingers crossed, early days,” he says.

SOMETIMES, COMPLETELY OUTSIDE OF THE control of the author, books take on a particular relevance. This has lately happened to children’s writer Kieran Larwood. Writing the latest volume of his Five Realms sequence, Uki And The Swamp Spirit, he decided on a plot that would see his hero, the intrepid if rather naive young Uki, on the hunt for an escaped spirit called Charice – an idea partly inspired by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

“She’s the spirit of disease,” Larwood says, “and she comes into the swamp and starts spreading this plague.” There’s some irony, then, in the fact that the hardback of Swamp Spirit was due to be published in the summer but was delayed until early 2021 because of the pandemic.

But perhaps the new publication date is for the best. That’s because – especially for those of us reading them aloud to children – the