Julie Carpenter is a London-based author, journalist and editor.
She has just written her first children’s book, Harry and the Highwire, which is fairly short in words but noticeably long in length, folding out to four meters wide. A story about the legendary escape artist, Harry Houdini, it earned her a PJ Library Author Incentive Award. You can read more here.
Before moving into children’s book editing and writing, she spent around two decades as a national newspaper journalist.
Her first job after graduating from Oxford University was on the gossip column of the Daily Express, covering both show business and political gossip. There, she got a glimpse into another world and met a dizzying array of famous faces including three former prime ministers, four James Bonds, a third of the cast of Friends and one half of ABBA.
She then spent many years as a Daily Express senior feature writer and theatre critic, conducting interviews, producing profiles, writing on current affairs, the arts and on subjects ranging from the rebuilding of the world’s first computer, to a day in the life of the Uk’s oldest rock band.
Some of her favourite interviews have included those with violinist Nigel Kennedy, physicist Brian Cox, fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, novelist Jilly Cooper and irrepressible entertainer, Tommy Steele. Read some of her articles here.
Work assignments have enabled her to go on a private tour of the Second World War code breaking centre, Bletchley Park, to try camel trekking in the Somerset hills and to actually perform in a production of Fame on the West End stage (for one night only!).
As a theatre critic, she feels hugely fortunate to have witnessed hundreds of memorable West End opening nights and has never forgotten the adrenaline rush of dashing out as soon as the curtain went down to file her reviews. You can read some here.
She has also written a large number of news, comment, health, lifestyle, magazine and travel articles (a gastronomic tour of Italy and a mythological tour of Greece being highlights) and fondly remembers penning a regular column for the Sunday Express called the Glamorous Guinea Pig.
After having her son and daughter, she re-discovered the joy of children’s literature and began freelance editing for the children’s book imprint, Green Bean Books.
Little did she think back in 2008 when she interviewed the enigmatic highwire artist Phillip Petit (who famously walked between New York’s vertiginous Twin Towers) that she would then go on to write a book about a boy walking a tightrope. But then, these things have a habit of coming full circle.
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