COVENTRY’S CATHY Cassidy is one of the leading British authors of young adult fiction and has written seven best selling novels including Dizzy, Sundae Girl, Lucky Star, and Gingersnaps.
The Guardian has described her books as “touching, tender and unforgettable” while The Sunday Telegraph has acknowledged her sensitivity and knowledge of young adult issues by saying “Cassidy’s characters have real heart”.
Cassidy showed a keen eye for a good story from a very young age and wrote her first picture book when she was nine. She continued her love of literature and art throughout her teenage years and after secondary school went to art college in Liverpool.
While there she developed her writing style and through sheer persistence she landed the role of fiction editor on the iconic pop bible Jackie. The ‘Cathy and Claire’ problem page received more than 400 readers’ letters a week and dealt with numerous controversial issues.
In the early 1990s when Jackie ceased publication Cassidy returned to college and trained as an art teacher. She taught at several primary schools but when she moved to a cottage in Galloway in Scotland with her husband, Liam, she decided to pursue writing books full-time.
Her pet lurcher Kelpie was the inspiration for the dog ‘Leggit’ in her first book Dizzy and readers quickly became hooked to Cathy’s wild characters.
As part of Cúirt Festival’s readings for young people Cathy Cassidy will read from and sign copies of her latest book Angel Cake at Town Hall Theatre on Thursday April 22 at 11pm and the event is aimed at those aged from 10 to 13.
Coventry Irish
Cathy was born in 1962 into an Irish immigrant family in Coventry. After the devastation of World War II, during which the Luftwaffe destroyed or damaged more than 60,000 buildings, Irish workers were recruited to re-build the city. Cassidy grew up with an acute awareness of her Irish identity.
“There was quite a sad cityscape in Coventry in the post-war years because lots of the old buildings had been destroyed,” Cathy says. “However the Irish were very important in building it back up and there was a very strong Irish community spirit where I grew up.
“Going to Catholic school in Coventry you sort of knew where you belonged and you felt strengthened by your Irish identity. My grandfather was from Kildare and I also had a lot of distant relatives in Fermanagh so I always felt a connection with Ireland. I even ended up marrying an Irishman and we go to the west of Ireland a lot. It’s one of my favourite places in the world.”
Such is Cathy’s love for the west that it has even made its way into her writing. “One of my books, Scarlett, is actually set in Connemara,” she states. “I love the whole Galway and Mayo coast region because it’s just so wild and beautiful. I find it such a magical place and I love to hear all the old stories about the region. Writing the book was such a labour of love and it gave me the opportunity to go over and root around in Ireland.”
The book on its release in 2006 captured the imagination of readers and critics alike as it reached number eight in the sales chart for children’s books and won the Royal Mail Award for Best Children’s Book.
Merseybeat and Jackie
Another British city the Irish have had a positive influence on is Liverpool. In the early 1980s Cassidy moved there to pursue her love of art and found a city bursting with creative energy.
“When I was young my mum used to say ‘Liverpool is the real capital of Ireland’ and I kind of believed that for a very long time!” Cathy says with a chuckle. “When I arrived there it was just after the 1981 Toxteth riots and there was a lot of nervous energy around but I fell head over heels for the place straight away.
“I used to go to art history classes in Hope Street in the very same buildings where John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe had their art classes. You sort of felt that excitement living in somewhere where exciting things had happened. Everything seemed to be possible and there was a hugely hopeful feeling around.
“I lived up the road from some of the members of Echo and The Bunnymen and we all used to go to this little café on the same street. You’d go for coffee and you knew that somebody at the next table was in a band and across from them was someone who designed clothes or painted murals. There was a sense that you could achieve whatever you wanted and I loved every minute of it.”
One ambition which Cathy hoped to achieve was to write for legendary weekly pop magazine Jackie and she wrote to the editorial team very, very regularly.
“All the way through my teens I was an avid reader of Jackie and from about the age of 12 I bombarded them with stories I’d written,” she says. “When I was 16 one of their competitors bought something that I’d written but Jackie never did. I eventually got a job with Jackie as an office junior and some of them remembered ‘That really annoying teenager that kept sending us stuff’.
“The real irony is that I ended up being the fiction editor at the magazine and suddenly I was the person getting hundreds of letters from teenagers every week. Jackie was a phenomenon and was quite simply the most popular magazine for girls in the 1970s and 1980s.
“What a lot of people don’t know though was that it was published in a little office just outside Dundee and so we rarely got to meet any of the stars of the day. The pop editor would be sent down to London every couple of weeks to do a story but very few pop stars made the long trek to the office in Scotland.”
Harry Potter, Twilight, other stories
In recent years children’s and young adult’s literature has grown in popularity, mainly due to the success of books such as Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, and Twilight and Cassidy welcomes this development.
“I think Harry Potter and the whole JK Rowling phenomenon was fantastic because it made reading really cool and that’s been good news for every writer,” Cassidy states .“It’s been the same thing with Stephanie Meyer’s series of books and I know a lot of the people who read my books read Twilight as well.
“I’ve seen some of the films and read New Moon but I’ve probably grown out of the stage where I would’ve wanted to fall in love with a hot vampire boy! You never really know what’s going to catch the attention of teenagers but whatever it is usually is very good. There’s room for all kinds of genres.”
Over the past six years Cathy has carved out an interesting niche for herself and her fans are incredibly loyal to her. Her most recent book Angel Cake tells the story of a young Polish girl, Anya, who moves to Britain and falls in love with the local bad boy. The genesis of the story comes from a real-life experience Cassidy had.
“I did a reading at a school and one of the teachers stayed behind afterwards with a little Polish girl,” Cathy says. “She showed me something she’d written and it was an incredibly powerful piece about her first days in Britain. Some of my best friends in school were Polish so I knew a little about the culture but I couldn’t really get the idea of this little girl out of my head. The story grew from that experience and I had a network of four Polish girls on my website that helped me understand their experiences.”
When Cassidy casts her mind back to her childhood she remembers her Coventry Irish identity but also her love of books such as the Chronicles of Narnia and Little House On The Prairie.
“I loved them with a real passion as a child,” she says. “They’re books that have a real sense of place and you sort of get drawn in to the wildness of the landscape. They’re just wonderfully well crafted and are timeless.”
Tickets are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777.
