Alex Milway - Official Website
Children's author, illustrator, screenwriter
It’s been a difficult year for everyone, but how have the guests and staff at HOTEL FLAMINGO coped with life in lockdown?
Join Anna, T.Bear, Madame Le Pig and the whole gang to find out what it’s like running a hotel when you aren’t allowed new guests.
(Also featuring exclusive FREE CHAPTER of my new series: BIG SKY MOUNTAIN (available for pre-order now!)
I am so excited to share this with you all!
My new series Big Sky Mountain is publishing June 2021 with Piccadilly Press (who also publish my Hotel Flamingo series).
It got wilderness, adventure, and lots of fun! It was a dream to write. It’s a story about a girl called Rosa who goes to live with her ‘Grandma Nan’ in a cabin in the wilderness.
Nan teaches Rosa how to survive in a very different landscape to the one she was used to. The mountain is home to many other colourful creatures; some friendly, some grumpy, some scary, but all important to the wider ecosystem.
In the first book Rosa meets a pair of beavers…
All of the stories in the Big Sky Mountain series will discuss keystone species. These are species that make a massive difference to our planet, and are incredibly important for all of us…
It’s quite a personal book. Not only is the subject very important to me, it’s also inspired by the relationship I had with my own gran, who would always march me up the Malvern Hills as a boy.
I hope you like it!
You can pre-order here, which is incredibly exciting! http://bit.ly/bigskymountain
PS. Pre-ordering makes a big difference to sales charts, so I’d be really thrilled if you did — but only if you want to obviously! http://bit.ly/bigskymountain
Half term is upon us already! Who can believe it?! If you’re stuck in lockdown, I thought you might enjoy this series of videos I made for the Bookazini channel (now up on my own YouTube channel too).
As well as silly songs, word games and a reading from one of my books, each video has a ‘How to Draw’ section, where I take you through the simple techniques I use to draw some of my most-loved characters (including Harold from Pigsticks and Harold and T. Bear and Madame Le Pig from Hotel Flamingo.)
Win a Pin Badge!
If you draw one the characters, please do send me a photo! I can’t promise to reply to every message, but I promise I will look at them all.
If you send to me by 1 November at 5pm I’ll pick one and send out an enamel pin badge from my new Alex Milway Shop!
How to Draw T. Bear
How to Draw Harold The Hamster
How to Draw Madame Le Pig
Remember to send me your drawings before 1 November 5pm! (Full terms and conditions can be found here).
I can’t wait to see them all!
x
Alex
Wow! This was a hard one to keep under my hat! I’m absolutely thrilled to announce Hotel Flamingo is the winner of the Brilliant Book Award 2020!
Even better, it was voted the winner by hundreds of primary school children!
The new award, developed by Lancashire’s School Library Service, involves thousands of children from Lancashire primary schools reading new books and voting for their favourite. The main aim of the award is to encourage children aged six and seven years to develop a love of reading.
Isn’t that great?!
Thank you so much for the children of Lancashire for voting for Hotel Flamingo! I’m truly chuffed.
You can watch my acceptance speech (and a bit of drawing) here.
(I should also mention that Hotel Flamingo was longlisted for the North Somerset Teachers’ Book Awards 2019 too)
My fourth Hotel Flamingo book, Fabulous Feast, launched during lockdown. (You can buy it now!)
Normally, I’d have been off out and about doing school events and painting shop windows to celebrate the launch of my fourth Hotel Flamingo book. But lockdown put paid to all that and I was left making do with our front windows at home.
Anna was ready to welcome everyone!
It wasn’t quite as fun as getting out to spend time with children in schools or reading in bookshops, but it certainly brightened up the house – and we enjoyed watching everyone stop to stare at it on their daily exercise.
Here’s a little video I did for Waterstones with a reading from Fabulous Feast.
At the start of the lockdown I made some videos of me reading extracts from my books, teaching you how to draw some of my characters, and singing some very silly songs I wrote.
In this first one, I read an extract from the first Hotel Flamingo Book and teach you all my super-easy method for drawing T Bear! So have a look and you’ll be drawing bears with faces like fried eggs in no time!
Head over to Bookazini to watch more and please hit Like and subscribe!
If you like making things, like me, you’ll love building your own Hotel Flamingo! It’s not too fiddly, but you’ll need some card, crayons, glue and scissors.
You’ll also need to download the model sheets to print out. There are instructions on the sheets, or you could also watch my How-to video on YouTube!
Have fun, get crafting, and let me know how you get on!
Has it really been a year?!
Too much has happened and I have no excuses for not blogging. Well, apart from dealing with everything life throws at a person, of course. (And the fact I forgot my password log-in.) So, time for a catch-up methinks!
I hadn’t talked much about it, but I’d been working steadily on a series of books about a young Robin Hood. They concerned BIG details about the character, such as him learning to fire a bow, light a fire, and survive as an outlaw – things that I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.
The trilogy began with Robin’s father dying, which proved problematic as during the writing I found out my mother had incurable cancer. I suppose the story and real life became intertwined in some way, and I found writing about a boy’s feelings concerning losing a parent was a bit too close to the bone. So when I used the word ‘steadily’ to describe my work rate, it was more stop and go. But the publisher and editor were really understanding.
Mum died, I grieved, things moved on, and eventually we were happy with book one. Book two, in contrast, was easy to write. It contained a huge battle at the end – one which I thought was probably the most exciting thing I’d ever written.
And earlier in 2016, I was close to finishing the final part in the series when I heard that the publisher no longer wanted the books. They were trimming their list.
It’s a very strange situation to find yourself in. The cathartic nature of battling through difficult work and finally succeeding in reaching the end was not to be mine. However, I do now sit with an unpublished trilogy of books about Robin Hood growing up in Sherwood. Who wants them?
So, that’s Robin out of the way.
I travelled the world. I visited the US and China, making school visits and talking about my books. I’ve been back to China once more in this time, and made some terrific friends. I also now know that Pigsticks and Harold will be published in China, which is a wonderful thing. I cannot wait to see how they treat it.
Of course, Pigsticks and Harold have a new book out – Pigsticks and Harold and the Pirate Treasure! We’ve started getting some lovely reviews, and I think this is my favourite of the series so far.
Now then, there is much more to say, but that can wait for a bit. Events are coming up, as well as new stories, and I am dead keen to write some ‘How-to’ posts about my model-making. I’ll be doing those soon.
So, for now, thanks for reading.