Literary Birthday – 28 July – Sally Gardner

Happy Birthday, Sally Gardner, born on 28 July 1954.

Sally Gardner Quotes

1. [I get my ideas] From everything and everywhere – books, music, theatre, people, conversations, paintings, buildings… I feel like I have a satellite dish on my head. But I have to think about the ideas a long time before they form properly.
2. Keep telling yourself stories and don’t worry if you can’t write them down. Try to find your voice. Don’t be put off by anyone telling you that you can’t do something – believe in your dreams.
3. Read lots of good books, or if reading’s tricky, listen to lots of audiobooks.
4. I think I was always born with a head full of stories and, I – my first conscious memory is telling a story and loving a story and being involved in a story.
5. I think you have to know your audience. When I write for small children, I’m very much a small person writing for small children. When I write for YA, I’m very much on the side of a young adult. I’m rebellious like a young adult, I want to swear for them. I’m not on the side of their parents.
6. Well, when I started this out, I was, I am immensely dyslexic. So it was much harder for me. Because in those days there wasn’t much to help you. Nowadays there is Word, which has a voice recognition on it which I use.
7. I think what I do is think of an angle. So I ask myself a question and if the question is really interesting I want the answer. I think all books are a question with an author seeking an answer. And so my story often starts with a question.

Source for quotes 1-3: Sally Gardner FAQs and 4-5: Writers & Artists and 6-7: Booksmart Interview

Sally Gardner is a British children’s literature writer and illustrator. The first book she read was Wuthering Heights, and after that no one could stop her. Gardner is an award-winning novelist who has sold over three million books in the UK and her work has been translated in to more than 25 languages. She won both the Costa Book Award for Children’s Book and the Carnegie Medal for Maggot Moon. Her first full-length novel was a breakthrough, as I, Coriander won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize in 2005. She has also written adult novels, under her pseudonym Wray Delaney. Her latest adult novel, The Bride Stone, is a Regency story. Gardner was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2025. You can find a list of her books here. Follow her on Instagram.

Source for photograph: Author’s Website

by Amanda Patterson
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