It is the life Matt's always wanted convinced he's lighter than air, he imagines himself as buoyant as the hydrium gas that powers his ship.

I got a letter from them, saying they wanted to take me on, and try to sell my story. Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the Aurora, a huge airship that sails hundreds of feet above the ocean, ferrying wealthy passengers from city to city.

I never heard back from Roald Dahl directly, but he read my story, and liked it enough to pass on to his own literary agent. Kenneth Oppels 'Airborn Series' are probably the best Young Adult books Ive read. In his latest novel, Airborne (HarperCollins, 22. We had a family friend who knew Roald Dahl - one of my favourite authors - and this friend offered to show Dahl my story. It turned out to be quite a long story, really a short novel, and I rewrote it the next summer. I started out writing sci-fi epics (my Star Wars phase) then went on to swords and sorcery tales (my Dungeons and Dragons phase) and then, during the summer holiday when I was fourteen, started on a humorous story about a boy addicted to video games (written, of course, during my video game phase). and on the opposite coast, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.At around twelve I decided I wanted to be a writer (this came after deciding I wanted to be a scientist, and then an architect).

In a swashbuckling adventure reminiscent of Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Oppel, author of the best-selling Silverwing trilogy, creates an imagined world in which the air is populated by transcontinental voyagers, pirates, and beings never before dreamed of by the humans who sail the skies.I was born in 1967 in Port Alberni, a mill town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia but spent the bulk of my childhood in Victoria, B.C. It is only after Matt meets the balloonist's granddaughter that he realizes that the man's ravings may, in fact, have been true, and that the creatures are completely real and utterly mysterious. One night he meets a dying balloonist who speaks of beautiful creatures drifting through the skies. Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the Aurora, a huge airship that sails hundreds of feet above the ocean, ferrying wealthy passengers from city to city. I was keeping watch on a dark stack of nimbus clouds off to the northwest, but we were leaving it far behind, and it looked to be smooth going all the way back to Lionsgate City. We were two nights out of Sydney, and there'd been no weather to speak of so far. Sailing toward dawn, and I was perched atop the crow's nest, being the ship's eyes.

Kenneth oppel airborn trilogy