Author Anne Fine is determined to use her new job as children's laureate to get kids reading. She talks to MATTHEW NIXSON about Harry Potter, Enid Blyton and selling five million books.

Anne Fine's early writing career, she admits, bears more than a passing resemblance to that of another famous female author.

But it is not just geography,Edinburgh, and circumstances, writing as a young mother with a small child, that mirror those of Harry Potter creator JK Rowling. Both women have enjoyed phenomenal success.

Fine has, at last count, sold some five million books in 25 languages. And her novel Madame Doubtfire, like Harry Potter, became a blockbuster film.

"I got stuck in an Edinburgh flat with a small baby and couldn't get to the library and started to write out of desperation," she explains. "I suppose the sensible version is that I sat down to write and was very happy and never stopped."

Twenty five years and more than 40 books later, Fine, 53, now lives in County Durham and admits to being a low-tech author. She writes her books out in longhand in pencil before typing them up for submission.

Writing had brought fame, fortune and influence. Fine is currently enjoying her new two-year role as children's laureate. Talking during an ambassadorial visit to the North London Collegiate School in Canons Drive, Edgware, on Thursday last week, she says she is determined to improve access to books.

"Twenty years ago most children still had access to a nearby library but now people are worried about letting their children out," she says. "There are some children for whom reading almost appears to be genetic you put a book in their hand and they are complete. They will move heaven and earth to steal, beg or borrow a book."

These, however, are not the children Fine is most concerned about reaching. It is the youngsters for whom books have become a distant memory, replaced by television, computers and video games.

And that, says Fine, is where JK Rowling comes in. Fine draws a parallel with Enid Blyton. Admittedly without some of Blyton's less politically correct moments. "It wasn't that she was being deliberately sexist or racist," she says. "And her books haven't lost anything now those bits have been removed."

The point she is making is that Rowling, like Blyton before her, has become ubiquitous with reading. "She has done more for it to be normal for a child to have its nose stuck in a book than anybody else in the last ten years," she says. "I am not going to say anything about her books because I have only read one-and-a-half I thought they were a good laugh but I'm not a literary critic.

"I don't know if she'll be part of the history of literature but I know she'll be part of the history of reading."

And, having written some of the best known children's books this side of Harry Potter, she should know. Fine's many books and she writes for adults too, she stresses include Goggle Eyes, Flour Babies and Bill's New Frock.

Madame Doubtfire, her comedy of separated parents and children's nannies, was memorably brought to the silver screen by comedian Robin Williams as Mrs Doubtfire.

"Madame Doubtfire was optioned nearly ten years before the Robin Williams film was made," she says. "Then, because Tootsie came out at the same time, it wasn't made because cross-dressing had been done.

"But they never let the option go and every three years we renegotiated the deal. I would have got the world's worst deal if it hadn't been that every three years they wanted to renegotiate and my agent was tougher each time.

"You just take the money and run and it paid off the mortgage which was lovely for a writer because it's not like writers usually make very much."

Fine herself has two daughters both have doctorates in experimental psychology while their father is a philosopher. "I think the general view in the family is that they have the hard brains and I have got the soft one," she laughs.

Surprisingly, perhaps, she has never written for her own children. "You're so busy making their lunch and washing their nappies who wants to write them stories?"

She paraphrases poet Robert Burns to explain what people want from books: "If you want your songs to last, base them on the human heart".

"What children need is to care about something. It doesn't really matter what it is," explains Fine.

"You could write about a day in the life of a lost umbrella but they have got to care about the umbrella and whether it got found again.

"That's the secret of Harry Potter."

November 20, 2001 11:30

MATTHEW NIXSON