Children's book author, Jenny Nimmo studied theater when she was young. As a teenager, she read lots of plays and began her writing the same. "When you write plays, you have to put atmosphere in the words" she says and she's realizes now that the early reading and writing of plays helped her develop an ear for realistic dialogue. But at the time, "when I took my plays to the director he would just laugh and I thought, "I'll never be a playwright'."

This created a happy situation for children's books as Nimmo has written three books in her Magician Trilogy and will soon finish her seventh Charlie Bone adventure, a series that greatly pleases Harry Potter fans. Writing children's books satisfies her. "You have to take a lot of care with what you write, you're writing for people who have not been long at reading so it's important to write directly and get the atmosphere correct."

Nimmo's childraising has been filled with a bit of the magic that colors her fiction. Nia, the main character of Emlyn's Moon,hears and internalizes the refrain "Nia can't do nothing". Nia was inspired by Nimmo's daughter. "At eight, or nine my daughter wasn't enjoying school very much, but she was wonderful with art." Nimmo gave this artistic gift to her fictional character and at the end of the book, Nia wins a school prize and begins to believe that maybe she might truly be able to do something in the world. An extraordinary thing happened to Nimmo's daughter before the book's release. Her mother had talked to her about the book before she entered an arts festival and did a collage of her class. Both Nimmo and her daughter were floored by the "extraordinary event" when her daughter, like the fictional Nia, won first prize!

Nimmo's now working on the penultimate book of her Charlie Bone series, a book transformed by talking to her children. Nimmo found that she wrote about her children when they were young. Her dyslexic son was the model for Gwyn, the protagonist of the Magician Trilogy. When he grew to teen years, he told her that he hadn't liked how Gwyn felt so different and lonely. Her response was to change tacks and create for children, Charlie Bone, a character who's a little bit different, but has friends who also have strange talents" at Bloor Academy, a school for the magically-inclined.

Nimmo's writing in the Magician Trilogy echoes the Welsh language and embraces Welsh myths. She feared both might be strange to people not from Wales. She was used to hearing her book with a Welsh accent and at first it was odd to her to hear John Keating's reading. But soon she found that his "Celtic intonation worked really well". She thinks his reading of her work makes it "very accessible", bringing both the language and story "back to earth" while preserving the magical feeling inherent in her writing.