Hull author Phil Earle's inspirational journey to becoming acclaimed novelist

Phil is now an acclaimed writer of books for children and young adults and is shortlisted for the prestigious Yoto Carnegie Medal with his novel When the Sky Falls. The winner is announced on June 16.

“Please don’t get me wrong,” he insists. “My mum and dad would have cheerfully read to my older brother Jon and me, but we were both far too interested in getting outdoors, and either kicking a ball around, or wielding a cricket bat – depending on what time of year it was.

“If they managed to keep us still enough, then it was far more likely that they’d tell us stories that were made up as they went along. I wasn’t interested in yarns about kids clambering through the back of wardrobes and in to enchanted worlds. That wasn’t part of my culture at all.

“What I do remember from those times is the weekly arrival of the comic Roy of the Rovers. When that landed on the mat, there was always a tussle as to who would get to it first. And it was always Jon, who never allowed me to read it over his shoulder – he’d hand it over when he’d completely devoured it.”

What inspired 47-year-old Phil, he says, was slowly getting involved with drama.

“I’d do school plays, and I was involved with some local amateur dramatics,” he recalls.

“And I suppose that I was ‘alright’, decent enough, but there was never any thought of me becoming a professional actor. The best I achieved was ‘competent’. But I did go a lot of see plays by Hull Truck, at the old Spring Street Theatre, where I caught up with all of John Godber’s prodigious output. His plays were, and still are, about ‘real people’, about teachers and nightclub bouncers, and they all spoke my language.

“Godber showed me how to pace a story or a play, and all about economy and characterisation. He has a lot to answer for. Once, a play that I was doing for some amateurs was actually performed on the Spring Street stage, and I was so over the moon, totally chuffed that I was there, on that hallowed turf. There was something magical about that space.”

Phil then went to university – he stayed in Hull, and studied drama. Back then, he recalls, “there was no ambition to write”. He added: “After I graduated, I went into drama therapy with young people. I found it harrowing, and, over a few years, it really did take its toll. I am, and never have been, someone who can leave the day job at the door, and just walk away. I think that I took on – and absorbed – far too much.”

He moved to London, and took on a temporary Christmas job at a leading bookstore. It was to be the turning point in his life.

He laughs: “The truth is that you can spend an age carefully arranging the books into alphabetical order and genre, anything that makes sense, and then two four-years-olds will come it, have a rummage around, and it’s all back to square one again. It was all high labour, and little reward.

“But I did pick up a very useful tip from a colleague, which sounds pretty obvious, but which was great advice. I was told to actually read the books, so that I could recommend the stories to youngsters who knew what they wanted for content.

“Sounds a no-brainer, but it worked. And one that really did turn the key in the lock of writing for a younger audience was Holes, by a brilliant American writer called Louis Sachar. He showed me the direction to take, the purity of a story, where not a single word is wasted.”

That was endorsed, quite a few years later, when he was surrounded by five lively teenagers – between them Phil and his partner Louise have three boys and two girls ranging from 13 to 16, and each of then has had a book dedicated to them.

Having had the switch flicked in the London bookstore, Phil began to write. But don’t imagine a romantic attic in Bloomsbury, with the inspirational muse fluttering around in the background.

“The first four books were written on my laptop on the top deck of the X68 bus, from Crystal Palace to Russell Square, and I’d always try to claim the front seat, for the extra leg room,” he recalls with a smile.

“It somehow worked. I could eliminate all the noise around me, and totally concentrate on getting the words sorted. It was noisy, it was bumping up and down. Not easy.”

He confesses that, even then, he had an image of a ‘children’s writer’, and that was “someone with corduroy trousers, a comfortable jumper, and half-moon spectacles perched on their nose.

“Personally, I do not conform to that image. At least, I do hope not.”

These days, Phil and his family live in Hebden Bridge, and he divides his time between writing, and working in publishing.

He said: “There are very few authors who make much more than £10,000 a year from their books, so doing something else to supplement the family income is an imperative.”

Ideas for his books, he says, come from “what a lot of people might think are ‘ordinary’ events”.

He added: “Commonplace things, where I can give them a ‘what if? ’spin. “The development of When the Sky Falls came from an old friend of mine telling me all about his dad, who was in the Home Guard in WWII, and whose main duty, when the sirens sounded, was to get down to the old Belle Vue Zoo, in Manchester, with his rifle, and to sit outside the lion’s cage.

“If the bombs came anywhere close, and there was a danger of this lovely old beast making an escape, his order were plain. He had to shoot it, so that the public couldn’t face harm. It’s true, really it is. And that sent me off on to my ‘What if?’ tangent. What if it wasn’t an older man with a rifle, but a much younger lad?”

Another book, to be published in June this year, is While the Storm Rages, again, set in wartime, and based on the true story of a government proclamation at the very start of the conflict, that nearly all domestic pets should be slaughtered – so that they wouldn’t use vital food supplies, or go feral in the streets.

“Little nuggets like that just set me off,” he says.

Phil has met the man who triggered his career and his love of words.

“I was doing a book-signing in Waterstones in Hull,” Phil recalls.

“I heard that John Godber was in the same building. So, I had to go over and say a heartfelt ‘thank you’. He seemed a little taken aback, but rather pleased. Not half as pleased as I was – and grateful.”

His impressions of Godber? There’s a pause. “Well, says Phil, “he’s a big man, isn’t he?”

When the Sky Falls is out now, While the Storm Rages is published in June by Anderson Press.