30/05/2013 Meet the Author

The Author with Nick Hyatt. Tent macro one -- Oksa Pollock has

been called the French Harry Potter. She is a 12-year-old girl with

magical powers living in London. The authors could not get the book

accepted by any mainstream publisher so they published it themselves and

it became a success. Now the book has been translated into English.

The publishers are hoping that Pollock mania, rather like Potter

mania, will sweep Britain as it swept France. We invited the authors

to our newsroom in broadcasting house.

Oksa Pollock, she is 12, she has magical powers and she is living in

London. Tell me more about her. she has problems with parents and

she is a very common goal. Suddenly, one day she discovers she has

magical powers. It is very hard for her not to show her powers -- she is

a very common girl. Her family come from a secret parallel world which

exists in our world but we cannot see. Once the revelation is made by

her grandmother she understands that she is in danger. If you have

magical powers you want to show them but if you do that you are in

danger. So she has a good friend who is Gus, a boy of her rage. He has no

power at all. But he is very important. He is brave and loyal and

she also has another boy in her life who is dark and mysterious. It is a

classic dilemma for a young girl, isn't it? Do you think so? !Most

girls would love to have that choice. We saw that French girls at

the beginning of the story immediately choose between them and

they created teams to support one of the boys or the other. The story is

set in London, a sort of fantasy London which does not bear much

relationship to the real London, why London? It was unthinkable not to

have the story in London. We are such fans of this country, its

history, its culture, its monuments. It had to take place in

London. There is an aesthetic, a very specific aesthetic which is

very fitting to the book. London has a specific aesthetic but these books

do as well. You have invented a collection of exotic magical

creatures. There are some which are blue and servants and have an

elaborate way of speaking. Another one clings to your wrist and calms

you down. These have been imagined by artists. Where did the

inspiration for these creatures come from? We wanted to do something

different from other fantasy series. We wanted to create a whole series

of imaginary animals, not things which you would have seen elsewhere.

We had a lot of fun. We drew some small characters. We wanted one of

them to have an old-fashioned way of talking, slightly different. We had

a lot of fun to create these creatures. Whose idea was a

character originally? Which of you came up with the idea and now that

you work as collaborators, who does what? I am not sure where the idea

came from but I was in my bath and it all came all of a sudden. I

immediately talked to and about it and we were working on another

project at the time, a picture book for children. We immediately said,

let's get started. It is not who does what and how we do it, what is

more important is the story and what we are saying. We do not really care

who exactly did which part. What is important is the book. And do you

ever have disagreements? Yes, of course! What do you disagree about?

At the beginning we had many disagreements. We'd love to manage

our disagreements and use them. You have to go deeper and you have to

find some arguments, you have to convince the other. You published

the first of these books originally yourselves and only later why you

picked up by a mainstream publisher. How did that happen? Tell me that

story. We proofread the book, we got a tight set, we got it distributed.

We had a trolley we put the books on and we went to the book shops with

it to distribute them. We were very lucky. Very soon we had a lot of

readers, we had a lot of fans and word of mouth worked really well in

France, in Paris and Marseille. We had young fans who were 12 years old

and did not understand why we were not coming to Paris to do signings.

These kids were afraid that the series would stop and they went on

the Internet, looked for journalists' names and wrote these

very heartfelt letters to beg for the series not finish and this

weekly newspaper in France published the open letter from the two fans

who were 12 years old, begging for it to continue. Three days later,

this major French publisher got in touch. Four days later we signed our

publishing contract. It is fabulous. We believed it and I think that is

what life is about. You have to believe in things. For British

English-speaking readers, the obvious comparison is with Harry

Potter, JK Roland's work, are you happy with that or does it worry you