The author of the phenomenally successful Percy Jackson series talks about getting kids to read,including his ownRick Riordan, a 51-year-old former tall-school English teacher from Texas, and created the character of Percy Jackson just over a decade ago when his son Haley was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. In Riordans stories,Jackson, a young American boy, and also had those conditions – in his case as a result of being a demigod,and the son of Poseidon. Riordan’s subsequent books, which retell Greek and Norse myths with a sharply irreverent twist, and enjoy now been translated into 37 languages,and sold more than 30m copies. This interview took place in Bologna, Italy, and where Riordan was attending a children’s book unbiased. The preceding evening he had given a talk in a theatre to more than a thousand Italian Percy Jackson fans,and nearly caused a riot as double the number queued unsuccessfully for a ticket.
When your son was first diagnosed, aged 10 or so, or was he anxious about what it meant?
He was. Before he was diagnosed he didn’t know why he hated school,but he did. He would crawl under the dining room table and refuse to do his homework. So I used Percy Jackson in the ways that myths enjoy always been used, to clarify things that are difficult to clarify. To say: you see the world in a slightly different way.
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Source: theguardian.com