Tales Events – The Island by Olivia Levez Book Launch March 2016

On the 11th March 2016 I was invited to the launch party of this brilliant book, The Island by the lovely Olivia Levez!

The event took place at Waterstones Birmingham where the Waterstones team along with Olivia, her wonderful Mum and family took over the whole first floor and basically turned it into a island of it’s own!

All the food was island themed and was yummy!  It was almost like we were being fed ready to be castaway for months!

After giving Olivia a big hug and some flowers we tucked in!

As everyone started to arrive the room started to fill up and the atmosphere was fantastic!  There was a lot of love and proudness in the room for Olivia and we all celebrated with champagne!

(Above photo credit to Waterstones Birmingham with kind permission)

And not forgetting the cake of course!

After lots of mingling, chatting, eating and drinking it was time for us all to sit down and let the wonderful Olivia take the centre stage.

Every seat was filled!  The room was packed to the brim!

(Above photo credit to Waterstones Birmingham with kind permission)

Olivia looked a vision of beauty sitting up on the stage ready to give a speech and answer any questions.

Olivia told us all about her life long dream of writing a book and how being a teacher and being quite busy day to day she sat down in the six weeks holiday and wrote the first draft Of The Island in her caravan in west Wales.

Olivia even gave us some survival tips….take tampons!  She advised us to google tampon and survival and look at the photos….there’s amazing things you can do with a Lillet!

I got mentioned in Olivia speech which was so touching and completely amazing….I went very red and it brought a tear to my eye.

It was then time for Olivia to read a little bit of The Island to us….

We were all captivated!

Olivia took lots of fab questions from the audience including questions about her writing process, her inspirations and why she chose to write a castaway book.  Olivia told us she was very inspired by a story she read about a woman who volunteered years ago to live on a castaway island with a man for a year and was fascinated by it.  Olivia also told us that she realised there wasn’t a castaway YA book and had always wanted to write one.

Then we moved onto the part where Olivia got to sign a lot of books….and there was lots of them!

(Above photo credit to Waterstones Birmingham with kind permission)

(Above photo credit to Waterstones Birmingham with kind permission)

(Above photo credit to Waterstones Birmingham with kind permission)

(Above photo credit to Sue Wallman with kind permission)

It was a fantastic night for a fantastic book launch!

Thank you for having me Waterstones Birmingham and Olivia!

And most of all congratulations to Olivia on the release of your debut, The Island!

You can find out all about Olivia’s steps to publication in this guest post here

Happy Reading!