M.G. Leonard

Meet the bug-crazy children's author whose love of nature began with reading.

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Children’s author M.G. Leonard is a big fan of bugs – particularly beetles. She keeps exotic beetles as pets, such as rainbow stag beetles and rhinoceros beetles. The insects are so interesting to her that they inspired her Beetle Trilogy of books. Leonard showed The Week Junior Science+Nature some of her beetles while telling us her favourite bug facts, how she fell in love with nature, and the research she did for her new book.

Baffled by nature

When Leonard was 10 years old, she lived in the countryside. However, she’d moved there from London, and wasn’t very familiar with wildlife. She remembers at school, going out on a nature scavenger hunt and being given a list of all the things she needed to find. Looking at the list, she felt “utterly baffled”. The only things she recognised were those she had read about in books, such as acorns, which are Piglet’s favourite food in Winnie the Pooh. It was a shock to her that she knew so little about nature. Around the same time, she read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which features a young girl called Mary who knows nothing about nature. Leonard loved that book because it “shows that anybody can develop a relationship with nature”. From that point, she knew that when she was a grown-up she wanted to have a connection with the natural world.

Battling fear