I grew up in a small mountain village in the Galilee, North of Israel, overlooking the Sea of Galilee. I remember myself writing stories in my mind since early childhood. My father had made me a pair of wooden stilts which I learned to walk on, and I used to walk on them for hours on end, telling myself stories in foreign languages before I could even speak them... these were my favourite hours each day - walking to and fro on those wooden stilts and telling myself stories as if I'd been writing them.

I can walk on stilts to this day, over 40 years later... And the pond? well, when I lived in Switzerland and my eldest son was born, I used to love taking him to a pond where a little water turtle lived... we used to watch it and tell stories about it - which later turned into the book "The Water Turtle and the Tortoise".