Magi Gibson

Magi Gibson has held one Royal Literary Fund and three Scottish Arts Council Creative Writing Fellowships. She has had four collections of poetry published; won the Scotland on Sunday/Women 2000 Writing Prize; and was a prize winner in the Scottish Open Poetry and Asham Short Story Competitions. Magi's third poetry collection, WILD WOMEN OF A CERTAIN AGE (Chapman) is now in its third print run. Her poems and short stories have been anthologised in collections such as MODERN SCOTTISH WOMEN POETS and SCOTTISH LOVE POEMS (both Canongate). Poems for young people appear in I WOULDN'T THANK YOU FOR A VALENTINE (Viking), SCOTTISH POEMS 2000, and PARENTS KEEP OUT! (Macmillan).

A former teacher in a special unit for teenagers excluded from mainstream school, Magi has co-written a play for BBC Radio 4 with comedy writer Ian Macpherson as well as working on various novels for tweens and teens. She regularly visits schools all over Scotland carrying out creative writing projects and reading from her work.

Magi's first novel, SASSY BLU: ECO WARRIOR BABE, will be published by Puffin in Spring 2009 and is the first in a series of three books featuring Sassy.

Sassy Blu is one eco-aware 13-year-old. When she’s not mixing smoothies or strumming her guitar she’s exercising her conscience (which is about the size of her hometown). In fact, she’s a fully-fledged Eco-Warrior-Babe whose stunts include holding up the butcher’s shop with a cleaver in an attempt to make them stock only kindly-raised meat. But when her father decides to stand as an SMP on a family values ticket she has to curtail her eco-antics – the deal is that he’ll pay for her to cut a demo disc if she behaves.

Can Sassy really keep to being a nice and normal daughter? Are hair straighteners contributing greatly to global warming? And does she really have to act delicate and needy – and remove her cargo pants in exchange for a dress - for the lovely Magnus to notice her?