The Fat and Juicy Place

Diana Kidd wrote all her life, and always dreamed that one day she would have a book published. She began writing for children when her first child was born and her dream came true when The Day Grandma Came to Stay was published in 1988. Diana trained and worked as a primary school teacher in Melbourne. She left and worked her passage by ship to Greece, worked in England and Spain and travelled in Europe. She married her husband Simon in London and returned to Australia to bring up a family of three children.

Diana had a variety of occupations, but it was her experience teaching English to migrant children that most influenced the direction of her first three books. The idea that peoples' cultures and traditions are of great consequence and must be respected and nurtured is the underlying theme of The Day Grandma Came to Stay, and was the seed from which Onion Tears and The Fat and Juicy Place grew.

Onion Tears, shortlisted in the 1990 Children's Book of the Year awards and winner of the 1990 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Children's Literature, was inspired by stories written by Southeast Asian students at Richmond Girls High School in Melbourne, about their lives and journeys to Australia. 'Too often,' said Diana, 'people from other cultures are stereotyped and dehumanised'. She decided to write a story that would present a child from another culture whom the reader would get to know like a friend. While the culture and experiences of Nam-Huong may be very different from those of most readers of Onion Tears, her feelings of love, fear, happiness and loneliness which she shared, are common to us all.

The Fat and Juicy Place, which took two years to research and write, continues the theme of a child, this time a city Aboriginal boy, living between two cultures. Diana talked to Aboriginal students, teachers and families in Sydney and camped with Aboriginal families on the NSW coast and in Arnhem Land and they shared their stories with her. Shortlisted in the1992 Victorian Premiers Literary Awards and the 1993 Children's Book Council Book Awards Junior Readers Section and winner of the 1993 Australian Multicultural Award for Children's Literature (Junior Fiction Section).

In 1994 Diana had two books published: a novel for younger readers Spider and the King and a picturebook Paddymelon illustrated by Maxim Svetlanov.

I Love You, Jason Delaney was published in 1996 and was shortlisted in the Junior Readers Section of the 1997 Children's Book Council Book of the Year Awards.

One of the things that Diana enjoyed was going to the theatre. Before she married, she acted in lots of plays and she believed that acting influenced her writing. Her actual words: 'I see each scene that I write as if it is taking place on a stage. The characters seem to take over. I watch them in my mind as they move from scene to scene, and as they say their lines, I write them down.'