

However it happened, I was immediately enthralled. With all the great middle grade fiction out there who has time for YA? So I’m not sure how I got conned into reading the first Monster Blood Tattoo Foundling back in 2006. This is out of necessity as a children’s librarian more than any personal animosity towards the genre. Abandoning all other paid work, he spent the next two years propped up with one small advance after the other as his publisher tried desperately to keep him from eating his furniture. Cornish was sent away with the task of delivering 1,000 words the following week and each week thereafter. Learning of his journals, she bullied him into writing a story from his world. It was not until 2003 that a chance encounter with a children's publisher gave him an opportunity to develop these ideas further. Over the next ten years he filled 23 journals with his pictures, definitions, ideas and histories of his world, the Half-Continent. Hermann Hesse, Kafka and other writers convinced him there were ways to be fantastical without conforming to the generally accepted notions of fantasy. Classical ideas as well as the great desire to continue what Mervyn Peake had begun but not finished led him to delineate his own world. He had read Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, The Iliad, and Paul Gallico's Love of Seven Dolls. He studied illustration at the University of South Australia, where he began to compile a series of notebooks, beginning with #1 in 1993. And by age eleven he had made his first book, called "Attack from Mars." It featured Jupitans and lots and lots of drawings of space battles. He spent most of his childhood drawing, as well as most of his teenage and adult years as well. But words were not yet his earliest tools for storytelling. Tolkien, completely convinced him that other worlds existed, and that writers had a key to these worlds. It made him realize that worlds beyond his own were possible, and he failed to eat his popcorn. Cornish was born in time to see the first Star Wars movie. The third in the series is yet to be named.ĭ.M.


The second book named Lamplighter was released in May 2008.

His first book is Foundling, the first part of the Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy. (David) Cornish (born 1972) is a fantasy author and illustrator from Adelaide, South Australia.
