The Hour

Children’s author Anthony Horowitz has embraced a new hi tech way of communicating with kids by streaming a Q and A session live to Scotland’s schools live on the internet.

The broadcast reached as many as 9,000 pupils in a bid to get more youngsters interested in books as 215 schools tuned in via the web.

Horowitz, whose latest novel The Power of Five: Necropolis was released last month, told STV’s The Hour about the groundbreaking event.

He said: “I really have had the most extraordinary morning here in Edinburgh talking to about 150 kids in the surgeon’s hall and at the same time I was talking to possibly as many as 11,000 children all over Scotland.

“We’re talking the Highlands, the lowlands, the islands, the whole works all through the wonders of the internet. That was something I’d really never done before.

“It was something that I found very nerve-wracking in a way to do but it seemed to go well enough. At the children I could see weren’t dying of boredom.

He added: “The attitude of children to writers has changed fantastically. It’s incredible how much children are prepared to empathise with or want to be with writers like me and that’s great.”