Bidding War Over The Next Big Children’s Author

For a high-school dropout, children’s author Stuart Hill was garnering an awful lot of attention from the intellectual set last week. “His book was at the centre of a bidding frenzy last week at the Frankfurt Book Fair, when 20 European publishing houses fought for its rights. It has already been bought by Scholastic, which publishes J K Rowling’s work in the US, and a film rights deal is in discussion.” Why all the fuss? Hill seems to be the consensus choice of publishers as the “next big thing” in kidlit, and everyone wants a piece.