Mars Evacuees

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you so much to my wonderful editors at Egmont and Harper Collins, Sarah Hughes and Alyson Day and Toni Markiet, and to Lynne Missen at Penguin Canada for the warm welcome (and all the books!). Thank you to Jo Hardacre too for bringing such imagination and energy to Mars Evacuees. Thank you Andrea Kearney and Andy Potts for the beautiful cover – seriously, have you seen it? So orange. So shiny. It fills me with joy.

Thank you Marisa Pintado for your lucid copyediting and for actually being moved to go to see the Visions of the Universe exhibit at the National Maritime Museum!

Thank you, Catherine Clarke at Felicity Bryan, for your laser-guided agenting, for a life-saving suggestion about the sequel, and for exploding ‘They just don’t get it!’ in the back of a taxi when a different publisher rejected Mars Evacuees on the grounds of featuring too many girls in space.

Thank you Zoe Pagnamenta for flying the Martian flag high on distant shores.

Thank you, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Ivy Alvarez, both of whom generously talked to me about Filipino and Filipino-Australian childhoods. I hope I didn’t mess up too badly. And Rochita, additional thanks for being so enthusiastic about the idea and such a warm reader of my work. Readers, you should check out both these writers: rcloenenruiz.com and ivyalvarez.com

Thank you, John Rickards and others for calculating how far a twelve-year-old could jump on Mars.

Thank you, Samira Ahmed, for letting me chat about Mars on your radio programme, for pushing me towards public stages and people towards the things I write.

Thanks to my family for their unwavering support.

Thank you Mrs Cooke, for reading us Goodnight Mr Tom and for believing I could be a writer in a school where encouragement was in short supply.

And thanks again, Freya, for telling me – at a crucial moment – that you wanted to read this book. Even though you thought Alice was an old-fashioned name and that I’d started too many sentences with ‘And’. I needed to hear it. All of it.