Rachel campbell johnston biography for kids

‘I want to really flood them with a sense of the glory of the natural world’.

Rachel Campbell-Johnston is talking about the effect she hopes her debut children’s novel, The Child’s Elephant, will have on young readers.

In writing this intense tale, infused with a sense of Africa; she drew on many extraordinary experiences of her own, as well as a time of immersion in the ways of the elephant during a stay in Kenya. ‘Elephants are prehistoric forces.

There is something mystic about them: you feel it from their sheer size, the incredible complexity of their brains, and their enormous gentleness. And I feel a deep rage that we have invented ways of slaughtering them so unfairly’.

The Child’s Elephant is the story of Bat, who lives ‘embedded like a tooth in a jaw’ in a closely-knit African village, where he spends his days as herd boy to his grandmother’s cows.

Out in the bush one day, he stumbles across poachers who have just shot an elephant and a