About the author

So here is the official bit:

Davina Bell is a writer for young people of many ages, and a children’s book editor. Her award-winning and Notable picture books include All the Ways To Be Smart, All of the Factors of Why I Love Tractors, Under the Love Umbrella, The Underwater Fancy-dress Parade, Oh Albert! and Hattie Helps Out. She is also the author of the Alice books in Penguin’s best-selling Our Australian Girl series, the Lemonade Jones series of Junior Fiction, and the Corner Park Clubhouse series (Middle Grade). Her debut young-adult novel, The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love, won the 2021 CBCA Book of the Year for Older Readers and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards’ Ethel Turner Prize for Young Adult Fiction.

She works as a children’s book publisher at Allen and Unwin in Melbourne. A lover of words and ideas in many forms, Davina regularly travels the country, speaking to children and adults about books and writing. The magic of picture books continues to enchant her. 

Now that’s out of the way, here are some slightly more interesting things about me:

I love New York, blossoms, tofu burritos, nature, picture books, the New York Times and finding out interesting facts about Amish people.

If you are reading this and you are a fat baby, I pretty much already love you (and you are also very clever).

If you ever want to buy me a coffee, fyi, I drink soy milk, and thanks so much for offering.

In mid-2014, I moved from Melbourne to Yallingup in down-south WA to write a novel, learn to surf and master the art of gluten-free pastry. Turns out these are all quite tricky things to do! I only ended up writing the novel, but that book was published by Text Publishing 2020 and that's worth all the gluten-free pastry in the world. Probably.

Now I live in Melbourne again, where I can hear the trams ding and there's all the coffee in the world, but I still dream of the WA beaches.

When I was a little person, I looked like this - the one on the left:

I did not write this. But I sort of wish I had...

In 2012, I volunteered with Nakuru Hope, an incredible and inspiring organisation that educates children and supports families in the Kaptembwa slum of Nakuru, Kenya. You can read more about the project at www.nakuruhope.org.

Bye for now!