Me and My Children Books

Reading children storybooks and novels never fails to fascinate me (I still enjoy reading Gruffallo, Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks, any of Roald Dahl’s work, Famous Five, and have finished all the 7 Harry Potter books 😀 ) *though I have not found time to enjoy those books recently 😀

While reading all those books, I had always thought how fascinating to write stories of my own (and publish it). It never happened until 2011 when my sister started to publish her books (which encouraged me to also publish mine). I then dug up the files in my laptop to find all those manuscripts I had written (or partially written) for long long time. Also at that time, English-medium Instruction was quite popular in Indonesia. I wanted to write bilingual books that could be appealing for children (including boys-it was a bit hard to find books for boys in my country at that time), could provide them with useful knowledge (about animals, numbers, plants, the earth, the universe, the ocean, and many more) and introduce them to Indonesian culture, moral values, or etiquette and at the same time learn and practice their English (my English teacher cap on 🙂 ). That what started my journey to write books for children 🙂 I have now published about 40ish books (I forgot the exact number 😀 ) with some Indonesian major publishers such as Bhuana Ilmu Populer, Gramedia Pustaka Utama, and Elexmedia.

I started off writing and publishing my series as a single writer. But then, during a holiday in my home town, my sister-in-law and I decided to work together and to have our fairies to represent us on our books 🙂 Fairies below, can you figure out which is mine? 🙂

Then in 2012, I decided to go to the UK to continue my study in this university, and have not written children stories quite a lot since. If you see my new books coming, those are actually the scripts that we (my sister and I) submitted in 2011 and 2012. We had a lot of ideas at that time and were quite productive 😀 (I remember during those years we once submitted about 23 manuscripts to the publisher in a month 😀 ). After my PhD I could probably write some more children books (or novels 😀 ) along with my academic papers. Some of my books have been translated into German (credit to mbak Uti our lovely translator) and were displayed in Frankfurt Book Festival (FBF) in October this year.

Some of my books in FBF:

Some of my published books:

BW,
Fitri