Following Your Heart: My Journey to Publication

I can’t pinpoint when the idea of writing about a polar bear came to me. But one day, there he was in my head – fully formed and gazing at me with his dark chocolate eyes. There was a story he wanted to tell and I, for some reason, was the person he had chosen to tell it to.

Unlike my previous attempts at writing YA, this time the story arrived quickly – almost as if it existed already and was merely waiting for me to commit it to paper. I wrote a first draft in about three months and I poured every last bit of myself in it. If you’ve read The Last Bear, then you’ll know it’s a very emotional story. It came from a raw, authentic place. It came from me.

The sentimentality that I had once perceived as an insult, suddenly became my secret weapon. It became my strength. Because there’s no getting away from it: I am sentimental! I am emotional. I adore big, sweeping gestures, powerful feelings, raw intensity – anything that gets the heartbeat thudding. And rather than shy away from who I am deep down, I chose to embrace this side of me. Because I knew intuitively that in being honest with myself, I would also find honesty with my readers.

I knew The Last Bear was special. I don’t want this to sound arrogant – I just knew, deep down, it was The One. It was a gut feeling. Now it was just a matter of finding an agent who agreed with me.

And hurrah! By now a shiny green children’s version of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook had appeared on the market. Oh! The immense joy of knowing there was this literal catalogue of possibility without having to filter out all the grown-up stuff first. I pored over it, gobbling up the author stories.

Hannah Gold is a children’s author passionate about writing stories that share her love of the planet. The Last Bear, her middle-grade debut, became an instant classic and international bestseller upon release in 2021. A Saturday and Sunday Times Book of the Week, it went on to win both the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and The Blue Peter Book Award and has been translated into 27 languages. She is also the author of The Lost Whale, which won the Edward Stanford Children’s Travel Book of the Year in 2023 and Finding Bear, the bestselling sequel to The Last Bear. All books are illustrated by award-winning illustrator Levi Pinfold and published by HarperCollins Children’s Books.