Topic: Jacqueline Wilson

Dame Jacqueline Wilson, DBE (born 17 December 1945) is a multi award-winning English author, known for her vast and diverse work in children's literature. Her novels have been adapted numerous times for television, and commonly deal with such challenging themes as adoption, divorce, and mental illness, issues that have sometimes made her controversial considering her young readership.

Jacqueline Wilson was born Jacqueline Aitken. Her father was a civil servant, her mother an antiques dealer. Wilson spent most of her childhood in Kingston upon Thames, where she went to Latchmere Primary School. Wilson was an imaginative child and enjoyed reading and making up stories. She particularly enjoyed books by Noel Streatfeild, as well as American classics like Little Women and What Katy Did. Even as young as six and seven, Wilson knew that she wanted to be a writer and would fill Woolworths notebooks with stories of her imaginary games. At the age of nine she wrote her first "novel" which was twenty pages long. The book was called Meet the Maggots about a family with seven children. Although she was good at English, the young Wilson had no interest in maths and would often stare out of the window and use her imagination rather than paying attention to the class, leading her final year teacher at Latchmere to nickname her "Jacky Daydream". Wilson later used this nickname as the title of the first stage of her autobiography.

Apart from in English, Wilson did not do particularly well at school and had to re-take her 11+ exam in order to pass. After Latchmere, she moved on to Coombe Girls' School, which she still visits to this day. Kingston University has named the main hall at its Penrhyn Road campus "Jacqueline Wilson Hall" in recognition of her connections with Kingston upon Thames.