Wendy Orr is the internationally
published and award-winning author of
more than thirty books, ranging from
picture books to adult. In 2008 Nim’s
Island was released as a Hollywood
feature film starring Jodie Foster, Abigail
Breslin and Gerard Butler; Return to
Nim’s Island, based on Nim at Sea and
starring Bindi Irwin as Nim, followed in
2013. Her most recent book is the third in
the series, Rescue on Nim’s Island,
published in 2014 by Allen & Unwin and
is in development as a film. Her next
book, Dragonfly Song, will be released in
July 2016 by Allen & Unwin.
Wendy Orr photo by Roger Gould
‘But the mist was creeping down from
the high moors, and the Legion marched into it,
straight into it, and it licked them up and flowed
together behind them, and they were gone as though
they had marched from one world into another.’
I was thirteen when I first read that sentence in
Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth,
which in 2011 became the film The Eagle. The
language drew me in as surely as the lost legion was
drawn into the mist.
The story is of a young Roman centurion, who,
on recuperating from the wounds that have
invalided him out of the army, heads into the wilds
of northern England to recover the lost eagle
standard of his father’s legion. However, what drew
me was the combination of this powerful adventure