The Wigtown Book Festival is always looked forward to with anticipation. This year’s event was a huge hit with the Leswalt Primary pupils who were lucky enough to attend on both the Friday and Tuesday.There were already a number of Philip Ardagh fans in the P5-7 class, so they were delighted to go to Wigtown to meet the man himself. Before going, they looked up some information on ‘The Grunts’, the central characters in Philip Ardagh’s book ‘The Grunts in Trouble, and decided that they sounded like characters they would like to read about. The pupils dreamed up some new characters and invented some transport to rival the Grunt’s caravan made from an old ice-cream van and a motor bike sidecar pulled by Clip and Clop the donkeys. The class handed over their ideas to Philip Ardagh who was delighted to receive them and promised to let us know which ideas he liked.Stuart Reid had an equally appealing character called ‘Gorgeous George’ who is appearing in his third novel which was launched on the very day P5-7 were there, and was quite literally hot off the press.If the aim of the Book Festival is to inspire reading and writing in children, it certainly achieved its aim. Noses were firmly in new books all the way home to Leswalt.
