BENGALURU: Lucy Hawking, daughter of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, knows the art of telling a good story. Lucy is the author of two novels for adults (Run for Your Life and Jaded) and the George Greenby series, with the final instalment almost completed and a TV series in the works.
But she writes with one purpose — to make science accessible and entertaining to young readers. “Children find it difficult to relate to concepts of time or space. I use storytelling to explain scientific concepts. It is fun and engages their creativity,” she says.
In the George series, we meet a charming young boy George Greenby and his friend Annie, and we learn about their adventures to the solar system and beyond. Lucy says, “It is not just children’s fantasy, it is based on real science. To make it factually tenable, I took help from my father and his colleague Christophe Galfard...”
When not writing, Lucy travels the world, meeting children and “taking them on a trip around the universe”. She also visited India recently, making an appearance at the Bookaroo Festival for Children in New Delhi. According to her, children everywhere share a common enthusiasm for space-related topics. “The countries themselves may be different - Japan, USA, Australia, India. But what is the same everywhere is that these children are keen to know more about space travel and black holes.”
Though Lucy was introduced to science at a very young age, she never had the inclination to emulate her father. “I loved reading books and developed a love for the arts. I went on to study literature and foreign languages at Oxford and then became a journalist and a writer.”