Francesca Simon

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Francesca Isabelle Simon (born February 23, 1955 in St. Louis ) is an American-British author of children's books and the children's book series Henry the Terrible ( Horrid Henry ).

Life

Francesca Simon grew up in cramped conditions in California, the oldest of four children. Her father worked as a freelance writer for television and moved the family to London in 1961, where he wrote the script for the film I Could Go On Singing . Francesca met Enid Blyton's books there. When she was eight, the family moved to Paris for two years, where they attended a French school. She later wrote for children of this age group.

Simon studied Medieval Studies at Yale and Anglo-Saxon Language at Oxford .

She worked as a journalist and wrote for the British newspapers Sunday Times , The Guardian , Mail on Sunday , The Daily Telegraph and the American magazine Vogue .

With the birth of her only son Joshua in 1989, she began writing children's books. She wrote a total of over fifty book titles. Her series of stories about the terrible Henry became a great success and has a total circulation of 18 million copies (2013), fourteen parts have been filmed for television since 2006. In 2011, without any help from Nick Moore, a rather unsuccessful feature film was released under the title Horrid Henry: The Movie . In the reception, the character of the terrible Henry was criticized as an aggressive, selfish, dull boy , but five- to eight-year-olds couldn't read enough of him, so their parents worried that Henry might spoil the children of the British nation. Simon compares the situation of the child readers of her books with adults who exceed their limits of experience in the cinema or theater, for example when they see how a character like Oedipus behaves. Simon advocates reading aloud and sees in this constellation the possibility of a secret complicity in moral thought between parents and child when they grapple with Henry's amorality.

In 2008, Simon won the British Book Award Children's Book of the Year for Horrid Henry and the Abominable Snowman . Her Horrid Henry books have been translated into more than 20 languages ​​and published in 24 countries. She was able to win Tony Ross as a draftsman for her books . The terrible Henry was broken down as an animated series into 52 episodes of eleven minutes each and (as of 2013) is part of the pay-TV children's television program Junior in Germany .

In 2013 a second volume of her youth book with gods of Nordic mythology was published .

Simon is married and lives in London. American biologist and scientific advisor to the television series The X-Files , Anne Simon , is her younger sister.

Works (selection)

  • The Lost Gods . Allen & Unwin, 2013
  • The wild Max shows what he can do . From the English by Anne Braun. Ill. By Tony Ross. Egmont Schneider, Munich 2004
  • You can't beat the wild Max! From the English by Anne Braun. Ill. By Tony Ross. Egmont Schneider, Munich 2003
  • The wild Max outsmarts everyone . From the English by Anne Braun. Ill. By Tony Ross. Egmont Schneider, Munich 2003
  • Wild Max and his best pranks . From the English by Anne Braun. Ill. By Tony Ross. Egmont Schneider, Munich 2003
  • Henry the Terrible . From the English by Anne Braun. With pictures by Tony Ross . Ravensburger, Ravensburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-473-34715-5 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Francesca Simon interview: what makes Henry so horrid? , at The Daily Telegraph , April 5, 2010
  2. ↑ Horrid Henry. Internet Movie Database , accessed June 10, 2015 .
  3. ↑ Horrid Henry: The Movie. Internet Movie Database , accessed June 10, 2015 .
  4. ↑ Horrid Henry ( Memento from December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), animated series, at Junior.tv
personal data
SURNAME Simon, Francesca
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Simon, Francesca Isabelle (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American-British children's author
DATE OF BIRTH February 23, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Louis