The Best Guide for the Neston Area

Neston Author is a Man With a Pan

You may well have noticed a man around Parkgate wearing a hat that strangely resembles a saucepan.

That man is Neston's new resident children's author and illustrator Martyn Harvey, whose book ‘The Boy in the Saucepan Hat' is proving very popular with children aged 6-10.

The book is the first to be produced by Martyn's self-publishing business Penzance Press. It has been received with huge praise and commendations from parents, teachers and children around the UK, and as far afield as Australia and New York.

Martyn's antics have been cooking up a social media storm, with lots of questions and merriment - just what the doctor ordered for us all at the present time.

Martyn says:: "Having settled down in Parkgate in the last few weeks, I've fallen in love with the area and have been running around in the Saucepan Hat to bring a little fun and silliness to the area in these difficult times."

Furthermore, Martyn has donated a total of around 300 books to local young families, schools and children's charities, including Liverpool L6, Radio City Cash for Kids and BookTrust.org.

As Martyn describes, he is making this effort: "partly to promote my work but also because I'm passionate about sharing my love of stories with children and encouraging reading.

"I know that many children will have found this time very unsettling and it will be reassuring for them to see someone doing something funny and ‘normal' when everybody is going about with sombre, long faces."

Born in Plymouth and having lived in Penzance, Cornwall most of his childhood, Martyn learned from his primary school teacher father to write stories and draw. His great uncle, an expert Cornish watercolourist, taught Martyn to play violin and to draw cartoons, on which his illustration style is based.

Martyn is a creative soul who studied classical music at Leicester University and went on to gain a Master's Degree in Contemporary Composition from Huddersfield University.

After his daughters were born, Martyn's family moved to his partner's Ramsgate, Kent home, where they lived for 20 years. Martyn says: "Sadly, my partner died in 2003 after a short illness. I started writing my children's stories shortly after, as a means of entertaining my daughters at bedtime."

Fast-forward 20 years and Martyn's daughters have grown up and flown the nest. Martyn tells: "I met up, about 3 years ago, with my new partner, Sarah, who has lived in Wirral for 25 years. Sarah and I were great friends back in our Leicester days and when Sarah contacted me a few years ago, she had no idea my partner had died. We struck up a friendship which turned to love and now, after 2 years of commuting between Kent and the Wirral, we have moved in together in Parkgate.

"Over these last two years, I have decided to change career. I have wound down my web design business and put 100% of my effort into developing my children's books and marketing them.

"It has been a rollercoaster ride as I've invested a huge amount of time and savings into the venture. One of the most daunting challenges is to get the word out about your books - in the face of a publishing industry which is based around celebrity figures such as David Walliams, who will easily sell millions of copies, due to their celebrity status.

"When you're a small, self-publishing author, it's tough - and this year has been even harder as we can't even do the traditional school author visits, which are the backbone of the new children's author's trade."

Being resilient and resourceful by character (and telling his own daughters to "Never Give Up!"), Martyn has taken to other ways of getting his name out there: In June last year, he filmed a series of videos, set in Eastham Woods, covering the school-child's perpetual hunt for Bugs and MiniBeasts. This series went down a storm with Martyn's Kent-connection schools and he is now aiming to do a similar series based in Wirral, Neston & Parkgate. Videos are available to view on YouTube, please search ‘Martyn Harvey the Poet'.

Martyn's next book will be based right here in Neston and will feature one of his formerly-unseen characters ‘Squiggle Pete, the Pirate'. This book will draw on the area's extensive history of pirates and smuggling and give local children a story that they can relate to easily, being based in the very area that they know themselves.

To read more about Martyn please visit here

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