In any given book you’re being told a story directly and are often actually inside someone else’s head, thinking their thoughts and feeling their feelings—so you can’t help but to see things from their perspective.

These reading experiences don’t have to be fantastical, or radically different from your own understanding to be powerful. It can be just as amazing to have your eyes opened to a character’s perspective when they are similar to someone who you recognize from your own life but have never considered before. It’s a sad fact that it’s very easy to overlook other people, and to get caught up in the day-to-day business of leading your own life'.

These days, everyone has seen the photographs of the so-called “cathedral boats” where every single inch of deck space is packed with a human being desperate to escape their old life or to begin a new one. What we wanted to do with ILLEGAL, was to take one person on that dodgy, unseaworthy boat and tell their story. 

 We figured that if we could make our readers feel empathy for one person in the boat, then that would perhaps change the head-numbing statistics into human beings'.

Among the displays at the museum is the diary of the late Charles Edward Smith, M.R.C.S., who was the surgeon on board the Diana, the last whaler to sail from Hull. After many months, the ship broke free of the ice and make it's way to Shetland, where half the crew had come from. 

I feared a gory description of whaling when I began reading. But no - it turned out to be a masterful description of the best of humanity under the most frightful conditions.  Members of the crew leap off the page, fascinating characters who, though individuals, are also caring members of a band of brothers thrown together in adversity, sharing the same predicament'.

So how to go about encouraging empathy in our littlest citizens?

I think they are capable of great empathy– but it’s about giving information on that other person’s needs so they don’t have to turn emotional somersaults to slip into another’s shoes. 

It’s about helping them to make that imaginative leap in an unconvoluted way. Stories are an ideal way of doing this'. 

And how do we practice and teach empathy to our children when our lives are full of timetables, missed dentist appointments and traffic jams?

We all have access to the best resource that was ever invented – stories. The characters in these stories suffer calamity, celebrate birthdays, miss their grandparents, fear thunderstorms and triumph over adversity. 

By joining wonderful characters on their journeys, children put themselves in someone else’s shoes'.

But the characters in books, in your favourite books – they open up and share themselves with you. You can hear their thoughts and know them, a little. 

And perhaps, by knowing them, a little window will be opened into the lives of your friends and family, into the strangers and people you see in the news. 

Just knowing that window exists is one beginning of empathy'.