“Anyone can be a unicorn rider”

“I think I spent quite a lot of my 20s trying to pretend I didn’t want to be a writer. I’d gone to Cambridge to study Russian and Spanish, before switching to a law degree and qualifying. I tried to force the law thing to work in various ways, becoming a social services lawyer. I’d even tried to become a teacher at one point because I thought ‘that’ll get me a bit closer to books’. But writing was always something I’d wanted to do. 

I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (T1D) when I was about four. I had a really bad kidney infection, I had quite a lot of kidney complications as a child actually. T1D doesn’t run in my family, my mum actually suspected that I might have it because she saw it on Holby City! There was an episode where a patient was really thirsty and going to the loo a lot. She took me to the doctor and said ‘I think she might have type 1 because I saw it on Holby City’, which is quite a cool example of awareness-raising. 

Inclusivity and adventure

I think my own experiences have helped make my writing as inclusive as it can be. Growing up, I loved reading fantasy and adventure books but they would only really feature one kind of child. Now there’s lots of books that are much more diverse but in my time, there was very little. I remember this one book I loved where the main character had a heart murmur. It was the only book that I’d ever read where a child went to this really cool realm that had dragons but also had to spend time in hospital because of his condition. Around that time I was also admitted to hospital and I think it had a massive impact on me. It made me realise what was missing from lots of other books.  

As a child, if you don’t see yourself in a fantasy story, it makes you feel like maybe don’t fit in the real world. Because if that’s where you go to escape and have fun, when you come back into the real world you might think ‘well, I wasn’t in that. Should I be in this either?’ 

Importance of representation

That’s really the aim with Skandar, anyone can be a unicorn rider. It’s the very premise of the series, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, who your parents are, or how much money you’ve got. The whole point is if you’re destined for a unicorn, then you get to go to this island. 

So for kids like me who genuinely would have been trying to work out whether they could survive in the magical worlds they read about, I made sure that the worlds I built accounted for that. The technical bits of managing a condition or navigating with a disability, I have always made room for that to happen from the beginning. It’s probably due to how I’ve had to build my own life living with T1D. Meeting children and parents at events, they notice these details. In the series, there’s a character called Prim who has T1D but I’d included jelly babies, a preferred unicorn treat and my own hypo treatment of choice, before she’d appeared in book two. So many parents noticed that! At signings they would ask ‘why jelly babies? Do you have type 1?’ I thought that was amazing because I hadn’t even introduced Prim in the book yet.  

There’s nothing you can’t do

There’s definitely an increased awareness of type 1 now. Even in the last five years, I notice there’s more people each time I ask at speaking events. I found it all quite difficult as a teenager, people didn’t really understand what it was and there were so many misconceptions. It’s why I always talk about it but now a lot of the time, audiences already know what it is, which is really lovely.  

When you’re diagnosed, it’s really easy to worry about everything because obviously it’s a massive change. I can’t remember a life without T1D but I don’t think I’ve ever felt like there are things I couldn’t do. I think sometimes it requires more thought and planning, but that’s a great skill in general. As a lawyer, I had a seamstress put a load of holes in my skirt and jacket so I could have my insulin pump on the inside. You can always find a way to make it work, there’s no need to put a barrier or limit on your dreams.  

World Book Day: a full circle moment

I didn’t own many books growing up, relying on things like libraries and World Book Day tokens. So it’s a real full circle moment for me that Skandar’s been selected for World Book Day 2026. The idea of children being able to get my book for free means a lot to me. You get lots of author copies of your books and I’d always give them away when I visited schools, which confused my publishers. But if you think about how children access books, whether that’s from a school library or teacher, I wanted to make sure everyone who wanted to read it could. That’s what makes World Book Day so special, I’m really excited to be a part of it.”