Q&A with Basil Sylvester & Kevin Sylvester
Middle grade books feature non-binary tween ZED WATSON
Welcome to my first experiment using Substack for my author/illustrator interviews! If you’d like to see more, please let me know in the comments.
I’ve been interviewing writers and illustrators on my blog since the early days of the World Wide Web, and am going to start occasionally posting some of my favourite interviews as well as new interviews on my Inkygirl Substack, mainly as an experiment. One of my favourite things about Substack is that writers aren’t posting into a void; we’re part of a community. I also love the simplicity and clean design of the user interface.
This Q&A is with my friends Basil Sylvester and Kevin Sylvester, authors of the Zed Watson series for middle grade readers. I loved The Fabulous Zed Watson, so couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy of their newest book, Night Of The Living Zed.
I couldn’t figure out a way to link the timestamps to bits of the video like I can on the Youtube video, but I’m including them below anyway, just in case it’s helpful. You can also turn on captions in the YouTube version. I used Descript to generate/edit the captions and had planned to include the transcript but realized with all the fun back-and-forth between Basil and Kevin, it would take me WAY too long edit the text.
0:00 Intro
0:25 What is your book about?
2:00 What do you hope young readers will take away from your book?
3:43 What was the collaboration like on this book compared to your previous?
4:18 Special guest appearance by Gimli
6:28 What advice do you have young writers and illustrators?
13:20 What other mysterious or spooky books do you recommend?
15:54 What question would you love to be asked?
You can win a copy of their newest book! I’m giving away a copy, plus you can also solve a Zed riddle on the HarperCollins Canada website for a chance to win a limited-edition glicée print, and signed copies of the Zed books!
Read more about this interview on my blog, and you can also watch the video with timestamped chapters on my YouTube channel.
You can also see the video interview that Basil and Kevin did for me about the first book, The Fabulous Zed Watson.
Looking for other traditionally published middle grade authors on Substack? Do check out my list.
