I Wish I’d Written: Kate Milner

The winner of the 2018 Klaus Flugge Prize revels in the rhythm and images of Dr Seuss.

The book I wish I had written is Green Eggs and Ham by Doctor Seuss.

This is such a special book to me. As a child it got into my head in a way that nothing else ever has. I often find myself unconsciously reproducing the shapes I first saw in this book. The Dr Seuss trees, for example, with their gloopy, saggy curves balanced on impossibly thin trunks. Or his train tracks twisting out across the white page, impossibly high, impossibly far. The way Sam-I-am pursues the narrator with his pile of green eggs and ham does have the qualities of a nightmare but I quite enjoyed that sense of threat. What I didn’t like, as a six year old, was the number of words on each page, it would take ages to read all that! But, luckily, I was usually read to, and then all those words made sense. The rhythm created by those repeating rhymes is so powerful, it feels like an express train gathering speed. There is such a sense of manic energy in the words that when the break comes and the characters fly off into mid air, the silence, the absence of words is very powerful. It makes the reader hold their breath.

Kate Milner won the 2018 Klaus Flugge Prize with My Name is Not Refugee (978-1911370062) published by Barrington Stoke.

Green Eggs and Ham (978-0007355914) is published by HarperCollins Children’s Books, £6.99