Renowned International Authors Visit Sharjah For Children’s Reading Festival

Authors, storytellers, poets and artists from around the world will play a major role at this year’s Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival, organised by Sharjah Book Authority, as it celebrates its 10^th edition.

These guests participating from five continents will add sparkle to the region’s largest festival dedicated to children’s books during its eleven day run from 18-28 April at Expo Centre Sharjah.

Among the famous authors and illustrators is Britain’s Ed Vere, whose ‘Max the Brave’ is a New York Times bestseller and was named one of The Sunday Times’ ‘100 Modern Children’s Classics’. Ed will be talking to students in the session ‘Be Creative’, encouraging them to take more interest in reading and story-telling.

India’s Varun Pruthi, a humanitarian, actor, director and social media star who became well known via his social experiment videos on YouTube – earning 1.7 million subscribers – will hold a speaker session titled ‘Giving Back’.

Miranda Paul from the USA is an award-winning children’s author, who has received starred reviews from School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, will be talking about why we all love to laugh and how a humorous story can get even the most reluctant reader interested in books.

The UK’s Sibéal Pounder is the bestselling author of the Bad Mermaids series and Witch Wars, which has been translated into 10 languages. Sibéal will be showing students how to create fantasy worlds and comedy characters in the students’ session ‘Fairy Tales and Witches’.

Described as one of the most innovative storytellers of our time, Mark Gonzalez from the United States features on a panel discussion answering questions such as: How reliable is information on social networks? Do they have any kind of risk? What ways are there to provide children with sound reading materials while they surf the internet?

Natasha Sharma from India has published seventeen books for children including ‘Bonkers’ which won the SCBWI Crystal Kite Award for Asia and Middle East in 2014. Natasha will be taking part in a panel discussion addressing authors’ share of responsibility to present history in an exciting way and how children and young adults will be motivated to learn more.