The Visit of Ella West

Yesterday, the 9th of September, Ella West finally came to our school. The year 7 and 8's went to the auditorium to meet and welcome Ella West to our school. 

Ella West talked about a lot of stuff. We also asked her questions relating to her books and her life. She told us about her first book "Thieves", her book series, and how the cover of the books were bad. 

She got inspired by a documentary she watched about a disorder, XP (xeroderma pigmentosum), a real life disorder. That's how Viola's character was created, in the story, Viola has XP. XP disorder is when you get skin cancer when your skin gets hit by the UV rays but is okay when it's fluorescent.

The awards she's won 

• Louis Johnson/Creative New Zealand Bursary for New Writers 2006.
• University of Otago College of Education Creative New Zealand Children’s Writer in Residence 2010
• Winner, LIANZA Children's Book Awards 2015 (Young Adult Fiction) for Night Vision
• Winner, YA Children's Choice Award, 2015 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults for Night Vision

Unfortunately, she couldn't get to New Zealand's top booksellers because her book was published in Australia even though her book was set in New Zealand. 

She told us about her mum thinking that she's all the mum in the stories of her books and also the dad.

One of the students in our class asked her if she had a backup career, her answer was a "Journalist", she works at Southland Times forming magazines. 


A student asked her if being an author was her dream, she said it was her dream, she loved reading and writing. 


Facts about her: Her first book was published 39

She's currently writing a book called "Sound of My Heart", it's about a girl running and she can her heart beating fast. Ella didn't really tell us much about the book. But she said it'll take two years for it to be published.

She told us about writing about a thousand words per day and she tries to reach her goal, writing fifty-thousand in her books. Rainfall has fifty-thousand words and Night Vision has forty-thousand words. 

Another fact: Ella West isn't her real name, it's Karen Trebilcock
She talked about having two lives, Ella West, as an author, Karen Trebilcock, as a mum.

Her book, Night Vision was translated to Italian, called, "L'arte ingannevole gufo", the gufo means owl, since there's an owl in the story.

She talked about how she got her inspiration writing Night Vision, it was when she watched a 60 minutes documentary on kids with the XP disorder and she started thinking What could happen if a kid only goes out at night?


She talked about the dog in her book "Night Vision", "Jim" was her dog in realy life. Jim was her very first farm dog and she said that her dog has two different coloured eyes,
one was blue while the other one is brown - Heterochromia. 

She also talked about watching movies, like Star Wars and Harry Potter, how the lives of the main characters have changed, for example, Luke Skywalker, he used to be a farm boy and now he's a guy who saved the galaxy/universe. Harry Potter, he was just an average-ordinary boy and then he fought Lord Voldermort and as well as the main character in Narnia. She got ideas from those movies to write her books.

Our reading group, Kakapo, the group reading Night Vision, had alone time with Ella and we discussed the ending of Night Vision, she told us the explanations of why she ended it that way.