David Almond is one of the world’s most celebrated authors for young people. In addition to winning numerous U.S. and U.K. awards for individual books, he’s been granted prestigious international honors that recognize his significant, lifelong contributions to children’s literature, such as the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Nonino International Prize (he’s the only recipient to date who’s British and the only one to write for children), and the James Krüss Prize for International Children’s and Youth Literature, awarded for writing that’s “distinguished by linguistic brilliance, originality, imaginative storytelling and cosmopolitanism.”

Puppet (Candlewick, Sept. 3), illustrated by Lizzy Stewart, tells the tale of Silvester, an old puppeteer whose home feels empty after he donates his puppets, costumes, and stages to a museum. One evening, from bits and pieces of mismatched leftover materials, he creates Puppet. To Silvester’s astonishment, Puppet (or Kenneth, as he’s later known in town) comes to life. The pair venture out, befriending an inquisitive little girl named Fleur and her mum, who fondly remembers Silvester and his late wife Belinda’s Magical Puppet Theatre. This charming story of imagination and human connection encompasses moments of sheer wonder and joy.

Almond spoke with us over Zoom from his home in Tynemouth in the Northeast of England; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There are echoes of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio in Puppet. Was that a conscious influence? Have you long had an interest in puppets?

I wrote an introduction to Pinocchio some years ago for the Folio Society edition, and so I read Collodi’s Pinocchio again, and what a fantastic thing it is. It’s been lingering in my mind ever since. A couple of years before I started writing Puppet, I bought myself a couple of marionettes. One that I call Jack was sitting on the shelf while I was writing the book—inspiring me and keeping an eye on me.

When my daughter was little, we would play with her soft toys and make them come to life. It’s a natural thing to do with young children—play with teddy bears and pretend they can speak—and children just accept that. It’s a very natural process to turn things into puppets.

One of the things that generated the book was [that] I was sitting in a garden one day and just playing, picking up some sticks. You put two sticks together, and suddenly it looks like a living creature. The world is filled with potential puppets.

I loved that even though Silvester is a master of his craft, Puppet is far from perfect—his gait is uneven; he has three fingers on one hand and four on the other.

I’m really interested in imperfection. I think imperfection is the heart of everything we do, everything [that’s been] created. So, you know, a finished book like Puppet itself looks perfect. But of course, that’s an illusion. It comes from an imperfect place—the human mind. Like Silvester making his puppet, it comes from bits and pieces, from fragments that you’ve put together. And you hope it might stand up and walk; the book itself is like a puppet. We can’t be perfect. We’re imperfect beings in an imperfect world.

When I’m working in my notebooks, they are imperfect. They don’t look like finished pages. They are attempts, shots at something. And I think, I’ll do it again. I’ll do it better. We often teach children as if they should be aiming for some kind of perfection—especially when we teach writing—but we can’t be.

When Fleur is missing her father and says, “I’m happy, and I’ll always be happy, and I’ll always be sad as well. I’ll always be dark and light,” it struck me as such a profound insight into living with grief—and also, in a lot of ways, an apt description of much of your writing.

These things come out in my books. It’s not as if I plan to do this. It’s just that every time I write a book, it’s, Oh well, here it is again, OK. And I just have to accept it. Children need honesty. Children need to be shown an honest world. What Fleur said, I think that’s the human condition, and I think if we try and protect children from that, we’re doing them a disservice. It’s not as if we have to make them confront all these serious issues; it’s just that’s how the world is. That’s how life is.

I was in Italy recently, talking about [my debut], Skellig, with a big group of children. And one boy said, “You know, we assume that children have to be protected from things like death, but in Skellig, the only people who ever use the word dead or death are the children.” I hadn’t thought about that; that wasn’t planned. I had a childhood where I experienced lots of death and bereavement. That’s what made me what I am, and that’s what made lots of people what they are—the fact that they have gone through some kind of pain, some kind of torment. Then we come through, and we transcend it, but we still retain that pain and that darkness. In a sense, maybe it makes the joy greater, makes the funny things funnier.

Your books often don’t fit neatly into age or genre categories. I especially appreciate the blend of “real” and “magical.”

I think the world’s amazing. Maybe the world is stranger and more complex and more magical and miraculous than we often think it to be. Again, it’s not something I deliberately do, but it just seems to be something about the way that I see the world. I remember when I was writing Skellig, I never expected to write for young people, and I was astonished [when] I found myself writing particular sentences. I thought, Oh, you can’t do that. And then I thought, Yes, you can, because the readers of this are young people with flexible minds, flexible imaginations.

I read that an agent once turned you down because she already had another working-class Northern author.

People would say to some writers, “Don’t be too local. Don’t be too specific, because then you won’t be read outside [your region].” But it’s the specificity of writers that makes me want to read them. I write specifically about this place. It’s a kind of reimagined Northeast, but it’s based here, it’s grounded here. The same with the voice—it’s filled with Northern rhythms, the same that [led me to be] told by that agent, “I’ve got you already. I don’t need you.” It was thought not to be cultured. It was thought not to be something that would interest anybody. There is still prejudice in England about people with an accent like mine or people from somewhere like I come from, but it is changing.

What advice did you give your creative writing students at Bath Spa University?

The important thing is to find your own vision—and your own vision might not be accommodated within those narrow bounds that we often impose on ourselves. So it’s important to find yourself, to find your own vision, and find your own voice. You have to think beyond what you are told you are. You have to think you’re bigger than you might be allowed to be.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.