Andy Griffiths - Robot Riot Tour

Author Visit.

Any children's authors who want to do author visits of schools would be well served by following along with Australia's #1 children's author, Andy Griffiths and taking notes.

Andy is an amazingly funny writer who takes mundane situations and twists them to levels of absurdity that kids can’t help laughing at. With book titles like; ‘The Day My Bum Went Psycho’ from the BUM series, ‘Just Disgusting’ from the JUST series and ‘The Pencil Of Doom’ from the SCHOOLING AROUND series, you can imagine how popular Andy’s books are with those reluctant boy readers.

Children can be hard critics at the best of times. And if they are not interested in what you have to say, they will let you know. From the moment he took the stage, Andy had a large audience of somewhat unruly upper primary kids eating out of his hands. His stories and extremely bad jokes left them in hysterics.

Andy talked about where he found his ideas. A lot of them involved exploring own fears, like his dread of escalators. He had the kids revealing their own secrets and fears with him. One boy’s fear of having his head peed on by possums ended up being a whole story on its own. (I wouldn’t be surprised to see that in one of Andy’s books some day.)

One of the main reasons for Andy’s visit to Bathurst was to promote his latest book in the SCHOOLING AROUND series, ‘Robot Riot’ in which - Henry discovers that the new student at the school, Roberta Flywheel is actually a robot bent on destroying everyone in the school. All he has to do now is convince his friends of the truth.

By the number of copies of the book I saw being carried out of the hall, I think the talk was very successful.

I haven’t read ‘Robot Riot’ yet but it is definitely next on my to read list.

Thanks Andy for a very entertaining visit.