ABSTRACT
Nine years ago, my sister handed me a paperback she had picked up in an airport shop on her way to India. It was a gloomy-looking book, with a black and white photo of a steam train approaching through fog on the cover. Cutting across the top of the photo was a lurid strip of orange backing a half-legible title, and in the middle, an author’s name I didn’t know: J.K. Rowling. I began to read the novel and by page three, I was hooked. I had become the child-reader I once was: voracious, oblivious to time, suspended by words in an attic room of excitement, fun, friendship and bravery. It was 1998, and my sister had handed me a copy of the fi rst adult edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which came out a year aft er its publication for children. Across the globe other readers, children and adults, were discovering Harry Potter and becoming hooked in their own ways. In Britain and elsewhere, there followed an extraordinary period in which children’s literature exploded into the mainstream of popular and literary culture. Suddenly everyone was talking about children’s books, and not just Harry Potter, not just fantasy, but children’s fi ction in all its variety and invention.
