Elk drawing by Zac. Zac is 8 years old. He loves reading, playing football and drawing dragons and minotaurs.
‘Elk’ by Emma Neale, published in A Treasury of Poems for Children edited by Paula Green, Random House, 2014, and new edition 2017.
Elena de Roo is a children’s writer and poet from Auckland. She lives next to Cornwall Park and often makes up stories and poems in her head while going for long walks there, hoping only the cows and sheep notice she is quietly talking to herself.
Emma Neale loves reading books aloud to her children, even her teenager, when she can find him away from the piano or the drums. Her youngest son is such a keen reader he knows more about history than she does. He loves to test her on all the facts she doesn’t know. She has written stories and poems for children, and a picture book that will probably be buried with her because nobody seems to think it’s as funny as she does.
