On this page Wendy answers some of the questions that she is asked most often by readers of this book. If you have a question that isn't here regarding this book, why don't you send it to Wendy. She might add it to the list!

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Q and A: Nim's Island

Have you been to a far away island like Nim's or did you just make it up?

I've never been to an island like Nim's, but when I was a child in Canada, we used to go past some tiny little rocky islands on the ferry on the way to see my grandparents on Vancouver Island. I wrote a story about them, and when I started to write Nim's Island I remembered how much I wanted to live there. But the island in the book is based much more on the Galapagos Islands; my parents sailed there after I'd moved to Australia, and wrote me very exciting letters about it. So in the end I made up the island with some little bits of facts mixed in.

Where did the name Nim come from?

I tried lots of names for Nim and they all sounded wrong, so I started trying to make one up. The Hawaiian word for coconut is niu, which wasn't quite right either, but when I mentioned it to my publisher, she said, 'what about Nim?' Later I discovered that Nim is short for the Sri Lankan name Nimeshan, but that's a boy's name.

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