What are liz pichon children's names?
Liz Pichon (born 16 August 1963) is a British author and illustrator of children's books. She is best known for her Tom Gates series of "satirical realist comedy fiction", which has been translated into 46 languages and sold more than fourteen million copies worldwide.
Pichon was born on 16 August 1963 in London, England. She is the daughter of Francis and Joan Pichon. She received a BA in graphic design at the Camberwell School of Art. Her first job was as an art director for the music label Jive Records, a position she held between 1987 and 1990.
Her best-selling and multi-award-winning Tom Gates series was first published in 2011. There are currently 19 books in the Tom Gates series, as well as a special £1 book produced for World Book Day in 2013, a Tom Gates Annual, a Tom Gates Activity Book and a Tom Gates Music Book.
In 2016 Pichon created the "Kids' Tapestry", a children's version of the Bayeux Tapestry, featuring historical events to the mark the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings.
In 2017 Pichon, Horsenden Primary School and her publisher, Scholastic Children's Books, broke the world record for the largest disco dance.
Shoe Wars, Pichon's new middle-grade title, was published in October 2020.
A new television series based on the Tom Gates books is currently airing on Sky in 2021.
Pichon is dyslexic, like her character Tom Gates. In 1990, she married Mark Flannery and they have three children: one son and two daughters. They currently live in Brighton.
Runner-up:
The Brilliant World Of Tom Gates - TV SHOW BAFTA SCOTLAND 2021 Award - WINNER Best Entertainment
Writers: Ben Ward, Liz Pichon.
BRITISH ANIMATION AWARDS: Children's Choice Award
SHOE WARS WINNER 2022 (SPAIN) FESTILIJC3 Torre del Agua Translation By Daniel Cortes Coronas
Liz Pichon (born 16 August 1963) is a British author and illustrator of children's books. She is best known for her Tom Gates series of "satirical realist comedy fiction", which has been translated into 43 languages and sold more than eight million copies worldwide.
Pichon was born on 16 August 1963 in London, England. She is the daughter of Francis and Joan Pichon. She received a BA in graphic design at the Camberwell School of Art. Her first job was as an art director for the music label Jive Records, a position she held between 1987 and 1990.
Her best-selling and multi-award-winning Tom Gates series was first published in 2011. There are currently 19 books in the Tom Gates series, as well as a special £1 book produced for World Book Day in 2013, a Tom Gates Annual, a Tom Gates Activity Book and a Tom Gates Music Book.
In 2016 Pichon created the "Kids' Tapestry", a children's version of the Bayeux Tapestry, featuring historical events to the mark the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings.
In 2017 Pichon, Horsenden Primary School and her publisher, Scholastic Children's Books, broke the world record for the largest disco dance.
Shoe Wars, Pichon's new middle-grade title, was published in October 2020.
A new television series based on the Tom Gates books is currently airing on Sky in 2021.
Pichon is dyslexic, like her character Tom Gates. In 1990, she married Mark Flannery and they have three children: one son and two daughters. They currently live in Brighton.
10-year-old Tom is an ordinary sort of hero. He likes school, but prefers doodling to long division. He has a best-friend, an equally significant nemesis, and a teenage sister, who he will do anything to annoy. The first instalment of his adventures – The Brilliant World of Tom Gates – was published eight years ago, the title summing up his optimistic can-do attitude.
This year Pichon will publish the 16th title in the series, a remarkable achievement surely driven by the incidental, everyday nature of the plots. The books eschew conventional dramatic plots in favour of more quotidian exploits. As Pichon explains over the phone, from her studio in Brighton on sunny Sunday morning, “children are just busy being children. The big things that happen in their lives – missing out on a school trip, fighting with their sister – are the real drama of their lives.”
Indeed, the ordinariness of Tom’s adventures are key to the series’ popularity. When the first Tom Gates appeared on bookshelves in 2011, Pottermania still had a grip on the publishing world and fantasy was the dominant mode. Like Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, Pichon’s socio-realist stories offered an accessible alternative to the more literary magic-driven genre, and this has proven particularly significant for reluctant readers.
The form of the books, meanwhile, is as important as the content to their accessibility and popularity. Presented diary-style in a school exercise book, the pages are filled with Tom’s doodles, complete with torn pages and water-smudged scrawls: Tom’s dog really does eat his homework. There are loose plots that bind each book together, of course, but just as important are Tom’s idiosyncratic sketches or the song lyrics he has written for his band, Dog Zombies.
Here’s a sample verse from School Dinner Blues: “When the bell goes for lunch, I’m just hoping and yearning for something that’s tasty and not stomach churning. I’ve got the school dinner blues and it’s making me sad, all the meals I wish that I’d never had.”
Music is particularly important to Tom, and the songs he writes – and the bands he idolises – all reflect Pichon's own history with the music business. After graduating from London's Camberwell School of Art, Pichon actually began her career in illustration as a designer with London's Jive records, where she created the artwork for albums for Sam Fox, Ruby Turner and Billy Ocean, among others. It was at Jive that she met her music producer husband, Dubliner Mark Flannery, who has recorded versions of Tom's songs for series' superfans (of whom there are millions).
However, it is the visual appeal of the books that is paramount for Pichon. In fact, when Pichon first envisaged Tom’s story, it was in picture-book form. She had had been working as an illustrator for hire for several years when she first began creating her own work, but, despite success with titles like My Brother Boris, which won the prestigious Smarties Award, she yearned to work independently. After spending a year as a judge for that same prize, she became aware of a big gap in the children’s publishing market.
“Basically, you were supposed to go from reading these short, beautiful picture-books, where the illustrations were a key to the storytelling, to these long chapter books, with spare black and white illustrations at the start of every chapter, if you were lucky.”
With the Tom Gates books, Pichon “was interested in bringing all the kind of elements you might use in picture-books” to a story pitched at older readers. She started “experimenting with different fonts, space around the text, using the page itself to help to tell the story. I just started treating every page as though it was a piece of artwork.”
While she was writing, Pichon remembered the books she herself had loved as a child, in particular comics - "where the picture tells the story" - and the short silly verses of Spike Milligan. Indeed, the brevity of poetry was particularly appealing to Pichon because she herself struggled with reading as child. "I absolutely loved reading," she explains, "but it always took me longer than everyone else, and I had to know something about the story in advance if I was to keep going with it, otherwise I would find it really difficult to plough through."
Although she was never diagnosed with dyslexia, her son was, and she recognised in his difficulty a similar struggle. She was keen that her books would appeal to the reluctant reader. “Basically, I wanted to write a book that my nine- or ten-year-old self would have picked up. And the thing about these books is that kids who have trouble thinking of themselves as readers will get to the end of the book, and they won’t know it but they have actually read nearly 19,000 words!”
Sometimes, Pichon even leaves room for the reader to add their own doodles and annotations to her texts, and the latest instalment in the Tom Gates’ series, Tom Gates: Mega Make and Do (and Stories Too), invites the reader to participate directly in Tom’s half-term projects. The idea is to “provide room for the own creativity and to actively engage them.”
For Pichon, the reader’s imagination is as important to the ideas in the books as her own. Indeed, her Twitter feed is full of tributes to the creativity of her superfans, with pictures of their stories and art-work, which, like Pichon’s, is not limited to the page. Just as Pichon loves doodling with a Sharpie on her shoes (“if young readers are sitting on the floor at my feet, that’s literally all they can see of me”), so they love designing t-shirt tributes and logos for Tom’s band.
It was with this in mind that Pichon so eagerly signed on for the theatrical version of the Tom Gates universe by Birmingham Stage Company, which travels to Dublin in July. Pichon has been heavily involved in all aspects of the production, coming up with six original storylines for the two-act play, which has been co-written by director Neal Foster, as well as providing the artwork for Jackie Trousdale's set and Simon Wainwright's animated video design. Flannery has written the music for the show, as well, which allows Dog Zombie devotees access to the entire tween repertoire. As Tom would say, it's time to get the biscuits ready.
Tom Gates Live on Stage is on in the Olympia Theatre from 3rd to 6th July. Tickets available from www.ticketmaster.ie.
Tom Gates: Mega Make and Do by Liz Pichon is published by Scholastic, and available now.
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