Mahy, a lion in our literary meadow

Our zaniest children's writer is in line for the world's most prestigous prize. Books editor MARGIE THOMSON talks to an excited but self effacing Margaret Mahy.

Once upon a time there was a woman who lived at the bottom of a valley of hills, in a street named after a famous wizard, in a house by the cloudy, grey sea. When she looked out her window, she could see beyond the tall, green trees that she had planted, through the heavy, red apples, through the waving leaves of her cabbage tree, to the bay glinting beyond.

When she first came to that place there was nothing there, but she was the kind of woman who could always see possibilities beyond the mere present. She, with two small daughters and no husband, started conjuring a home, living first in two little rooms, and spreading out into the rest of the house as it was built. There was no water, and so she carried it in kerosene cans from the city on the other side of the hill.

Now, her girls grown, she lives alone in this house, which rambles up and down stairs, in and out of busy corners, filled with the collections of a lifetime.

She is still a conjurer - of stories, transformed from the buzzing synapses of her imagination into books which fly, as if on magic carpets, into the hands of children all around the world.

Margaret Mahy is indeed rather like a character in a book, and not just because she insists on wearing brightly coloured wigs - rainbow, blue - for meetings with her youngest readers. She's smallish and energetic, almost shy in manner but with a surprising, trumpeting cackle of a laugh, and she occupies a house that's an Aladdin's cave - or perhaps, a good witch's den. Because with her self-sufficiency, her unconventionality, her almost childlike sprightliness, not to mention her three black cats, she may indeed, in past times, have been mistaken for a witch.

Her home at Governor's Bay, near Christchurch, is somewhat off the beaten track of world literature (her glamorous American publisher arrived in the late 1960s, like a person from another world, with thousands of dollars worth of excess baggage and declaring grandly that this was the end of the world because no one would accept her Amex card), but Mahy is very much on the map - to an extent possibly not realised by many of her compatriots.

Here, then, are her vital statistics. If you care about quantity alone, the fact that she has published around 170 children's titles - and sold millions of copies in at least 18 countries including Mexico, Korea and China - is impressive enough. She has won prizes galore from several countries, including Britain's glittering Carnegie Medal twice, the New Zealand Library Association Medal the Esther Glen Award six times and the New Zealand Post Children's Book Award at least twice. Most recently The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom was shortlisted in the New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards.

Now Mahy has been nominated for the most plum prize of all: the "Nobel of children's literature", the Hans Christian Andersen Award, to be announced on Wednesday. This truly international award is administered by the Switzerland-based International Board on Books for Young People, and is judged by an elite panel who this year come from Austria, Sweden, The Netherlands, Australia, the United States, Brazil, South Africa, Japan and Switzerland.

Mahy is so extraordinarily modest that you have to believe that, should she win, she'll be more pleased for the people who have campaigned on her behalf than she will be for herself.

"Every time I think of it I feel guilty," she says, ruminating on the $4000 it cost to nominate her, the enormous amount of work and extra expense required to select 10 books from her numerous works, plus the donkey work involved in sending a copy of each book to each judge, in nine different languages.

But of course, the diverse organisations and publishers that got together to nominate Mahy for this award don't give a fig for the expense or the amount of work. They simply believe that she should win - and if she doesn't this time, says Wayne Mills, of the New Zealand Children's Literature Foundation, they will do it all again next year.

"Margaret certainly has the scope required to win this award," he says. "Her range, of both writing and readership, is phenomenal."

There are 28 other contenders for the Hans Christian Andersen Award with its prize of a coveted gold medal, diploma and international prestige. But while Mahy acknowledges it is exciting, as life is exciting, she feels "vain and superficial" talking about it.

If you're in the habit of mistrusting the modest declarations of the very famous, you must think again in Mahy's case. She chooses circumspection over grandiosity, wraps it around herself like a cloak, and explains her point of view simply by gesturing at her walls.

In the room in which we sit before a crackling pine-cone fire, on two enormous, deliciously puffy sofas, the wide, high walls are hidden by 12 crammed book shelves which reach the ceiling. Most of the hundreds of books are old: collections of folk and fairy tales from all over the world, volumes of children's literature from years gone by, old, leatherbound favourites by people largely unknown now.

And that's the point.

Mahy takes down a book by early New Zealand writer Isabel M. Peacocke and reads a passage where Uncle Mickey declares his innocent love for his young niece, saying that he could "comfort her in the loving clasp of his strong arms".

"You couldn't publish that now," she says, opening book after book to find the same thing: old-fashioned moralism, innocence that no longer reads like innocence.

"These books do not last for ever. They vanish; their truth dissolves, and I see no reason why it should be any different with my books."

Once upon a time there was a little girl who wanted to go to a birthday party dressed as a fairy, but her mother made her go dressed as a witch.

"She's got a good face for it," the little girl overheard her mother telling a friend.

Remembering the story many years later, the grown woman who was that little girl strokes her longish face reflectively, quietly, to emphasise the point her mother had made so long ago. She went to the party and had a very good time, but the next day at school some of the other children started calling her "witchy", and so she replied, "Yes, I am a witch!"

Telling this story about herself, Mahy is explaining her lifelong obsession with stories and fantasy. She had an uneasy early school life and was victim to the particular cruelty children inflict on those they sense are odd ones out. Mahy was different largely because she was so wrapped up in her fantasy life that she would make declarations about herself that jarred with other people's sense of reality.

For example, after she went with her mother to see Alexander Korda's film of The Jungle Book she began telling kids at school that she was a foundling (when they all knew she had lived just up the road all her life) and could talk to the animals. People started bringing her leaves to eat, and she would munch on them, stubbornly sticking to her story, speaking gibberish in the way that you would had you lived with wolves in the jungles of India.

Mahy began writing seriously from the age of 7, but was told by everyone she knew that a writing career was impossible and she should do something more sensible. So she trained as a children's librarian and wrote, wrote, wrote in her spare time. When she was about 25 and had just had her first daughter (a solo mother at a time when that was a very difficult thing to be) she sent a story to the School Journal. They asked if she had anything else, and she quickly sent them off another 100 or so stories.

Some time later, at an exhibition in the United States, Mahy's School Journal stories were spotted by that glamorous American publisher we met earlier, Helen Hoke Watts, who eventually engineered Mahy's first published books - five in the same year (1969): The Lion in the Meadow, and four others. The Lion in the Meadow, of course, remains a picturebook classic and has sold continuously since.

It wasn't until 1979 that Mahy nervously gave up librarianship and turned to full-time writing. She need not have worried. Her first full-time project - a book for teenagers, The Haunting, published in Britain, won Britain's prestigious Carnegie Medal in 1982, as did The Changeover, in 1984 - impressive when you consider that these days around 8000 new children's titles are published in the UK market each year.

The stories have poured out, making the job of those choosing 10 books to accompany her nomination for the Hans Christian Andersen Award extremely difficult. In the end, however, the books selected are all classics of their various kinds: The Lion in the Meadow, The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate, The Haunting, The Changeover, The Tricksters, The Great Piratical Rambustification, The Great White Man-Eating Shark, The Catalogue of the Universe, Memory, 24 Hours.

M AHY'S modesty doesn't preclude her from taking pride in her career.

In one part of the house the shelves are stacked with multiple copies of her books (which she gives away generously, and signs warmly), in languages as diverse as Swedish and Korean.

But, she says, "nothing you write is ever as good as you want it to be. I always have the feeling that the next thing will be better."

Some years ago she tried to read The Lion in the Meadow as if she had never read it before. She felt blindly along the shelf, found it, pulled it out, opened it at random on the page where the little boy says: "Mother, there is a great, big, roaring yellow whiskery lion in the meadow." Suddenly, she was struck by a powerful memory of her father telling her a story when she was about 3 years old. "Once upon a time," he would say, "there was a great big black-maned Abyssinian lion ... "

"And it just seemed to me that it was the same lion," Mahy says, "a subconscious connection that I'd never made before, but now it seems to me that that lion had been lurking around in my head all those years."

She describes herself as being "in favour of kindness to animals and children and other people". She tries to act as truly as she can, but believes that the pursuit of truth "leads us into very smudgy areas" - that is, truth is rarely absolute, and she certainly doesn't hold with attitudes that proclaim that "if A is right, B is wrong". Life, like stories, is many-sided and, she says, we all choose how we will tell the story of our own life.

Despite the busyness of her public life - rushing to Auckland and Wellington for various children's book events, judging competitions, writing essays - she describes her life now as "small".

She lives alone but for the cats and one large, enthusiastic poodle named Baxter, whom she takes for walks. She sometimes minds her grandchildren, who live close by. She counts her luck, admits her talent.

When things are quiet and she can find the focus she needs, she makes her way past the bulging walls of books, the collections of masks, puppets, dolls, the walls crammed with original illustrations from her books, to her computer and begins to tap into her fecund imagination.