Patience Agbabi

I love words: the shape of them, the sound of them, the feel of them on the tip of the tongue. My four poetry books are a celebration of words on the page and the stage. The last one, Telling Tales, retold Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in a range of voices and poetic forms. Like the original, some of it was brutal; some of it biblical; some of it below-the-belt. The best bit was inhabiting each character, each voice, and this led quite naturally to writing fiction. For children! Writing for 9-12 year olds let me indulge my obsessions with wordplay, numbers, time-travel, track and field athletics, Olympics and leap years. My heroine, Elle, is obsessed with these things. She's a leapling, born on the 29th of February, with the ability to leap through time. She must solve a crime in the future in order to save the present. The Infinite is the first book in the Leap Cycle and the most enjoyable book I've ever written. It comes out in April 2020.