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Digital start-up Freed Fiction is teaming up with Hot Key Books to run interactive storytelling workshops in schools based on the new Benjamin Zephaniah book, Terror Kid.
During the workshops, pupils will read extracts from Terror Kid, which opens during fictional riots and tells the story of a teenage computer hacker, and then write their own stories based on the narrative using Freed Fiction software.
Bea Longworth, co-founder of Freed Fiction, said writing stories in this way has elements of fan fiction and gaming (because the pupils use a computer and can choose the direction of the narrative) and she hopes the workshops will encourage reluctant readers.
“There is a lot of information out there about kids disengaging with reading and even if they have a functional literacy level, if they don’t love reading it can have a detrimental long-term effect,” she told The Bookseller. “We want them to get enthusiastic about reading and by doing it this way, instead of something challenging and not very interesting it becomes something cool and fun.”
The online element is also a powerful tool for publishers to market their books, she added.
Longworth will start hosting the workshops this month and is offering them to pupils in year 9 and above to any schools in the country. Schools will be asked to pay for the workshops but if they can’t “we will work with them to find other sources of funding”, she said.
Terror Kid, published last wek, is Zephaniah’s first book in seven years. In an interview with The Bookseller, he said he redrafted the story 2 times because of the importance of getting the story right.
“This book took the longest time out of any of the books I’ve written, I normally write a book in two drafts over about 18 months,” he said. “I had to get it right because of the subject matter.”
Over the course of the novel Zephaniah tackles the issues of modern policing and the portrayal of young people in the media.
Young people are “really misunderstood” and it is surprising they “don’t riot more”, he said. “On the whole young people are angry at the system because the don’t think voting will do anything, they see politicians as just being about spin.”
Zephaniah does not end the story with any kind of neat conclusion because he wanted a realistic portrayal of young man in trouble. “Life isn’t wrapped up nice and tightly, there is still more suffering and angst. This is not a world Benjamin Zephaniah invented, this is the world we live in now and if I hadn’t ended it like this I wouldn’t have been true to myself.”
He added: “I get a lot of letters from young people saying, 'I’m angry, where can I go?' There is a lot of frustration out there and I don’t know what to tell them.”