Childrens books written in past tense

Writing in the present or past tense?

Nicola Morgan recently won Scottish Book Trust's Scottish children's book award in the older readers' category with Wasted. She blogs about writing and publishing at Help! I Need a Publisher! Indeed, when I was searching my shelves for my favourite present tense books to tell you about, I found very few among the books for younger children, but many on the teenage shelves. But the past is not as natural a storytelling tense as you might think. It introduces a peculiar extra level of artificiality, an extra mental hurdle to leap: only rarely is the narrator telling the story after it has finished, but more often as it is happening, or from some point only slightly ahead of each episode.