BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Welcome to Late Night Woman's Hour with me, Emma Barnett,

where we invite a group of women to share what's on their mind

and what's getting them going at the moment.

So who's around the table with me today?

I'm very pleased to introduce to Viv Groskop, writer and broadcaster,

Juno Dawson, the author and Kenya Hunt, deputy editor of Elle magazine.

Welcome to you all.

June, I'm going to start with you.

Superam.

Okay.

People have been buying books, I'm sure, for stockings, for Christmas, for all sorts of reasons coming up to this festive period.

And children's authors, in particular, they've caught your eye.

What do you want to say about them, do you know? Yeah, it was interesting. Just last week they published the top 50 and top

100 of 2018 and obviously as someone who works in children's books. Well, I write young adult

fiction, but in this country, weirdly, that's still often part of children's.

You couldn't fail to avoid that two-thirds of the list are made up with celebrity authors.

And a good chunk of the list is David Williams by himself.

And so if you include J.K. Rowling as a celebrity author as well with all the tie-ins from Fantastic Beasts,

nearly of the top 100-selling children's books, there are very few authors who've come up through being authors, if that makes sense.

On one hand, I can see that, you know, I think on the first week of the new Williams book,

I think it's only 80,000 copies. That's incredible. That's 80,000 children who got a book. And that's amazing. And, you know, I was a primary school teacher before I was an author. And, you know,

...