40 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ OCTOBER 14, 2019
read to children at story time.
Cooper and Kellogg both knew Mahy from serving on the
board of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance.
“We’d see each other now and again,” Cooper says, “and [after
Mahy’s death] Steven and I were talking about her—Steven had
illustrated some books with her, and I’d known her for ages—
and we came to the conclusion that we ought to do a book
together for Margaret.”
The collaboration was something new for Cooper, who had
written the text for many picture books but never in such
close concert with the illustrator. “My beloved editor, [the
late] Margaret McElderry, forbade me from having any con-
tact with the illustrator—you got the text as right as you
could and then it went off to the artist,” Cooper says. “That
was fine, but this was fun. And Steven’s pirates are wonderful.
It was when I first saw his exuberant sketches of them that
the story really took off.”Newbery Medalist Susan
Cooper has two picture
books publishing this fall
BY SUE CORBETT
S
usan Cooper has published more
than 30 books; she’s also written
plays, screenplays, poems, lyrics,
and short stories. Though she
has been a full-time writer for
more than 50 years, she hasn’t had two new
books out within a month of each other, as
she will this fall.
“It’s great fun,” Cooper says from her home on the
Massachusetts coast, 30 miles south of Boston. “I’m not usually
this busy. But more than that, these two books also represent
the two very different sides of my writing life: one half being
serious fantasy, the other being things that are just plain fun.”
The Word Pirates (Holiday House/Porter, out now), illustrated
by Steven Kellogg, is the fun one; it’s a raucous tribute to the
prolific New Zealand children’s author Margaret Mahy, who
died in 2012. In it, a band of pirates led by Captain Rottingbones
nourish themselves on words pilfered directly from books,
destroying tales and making them unreadable.
The blackguards meet their match when Rottingbones takes
on the Word Wizard, whom the book describes as “a zany New
Zealander whose stories were said to be so wonderful that he
knew her words would be extra delicious.” Like the real Mahy,
the Word Wizard “lives on a green headland with her cats and
her bouncy poodle, Baxter,” and dons a rainbow-hued wig to