Rick Riordan, a 51-year-old former high-school English teacher from Texas, created the character of Percy Jackson just over a decade ago when his son Haley was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. In Riordan’s stories, Jackson, a young American boy, also had those conditions – in his case as a result of being a demigod, and the son of Poseidon. Riordan’s subsequent books, which retell Greek and Norse myths with a sharply irreverent twist, have now been translated into 37 languages, and sold more than 30m copies. This interview took place in Bologna, Italy, where Riordan was attending a children’s book fair. The previous evening he had given a talk in a theatre to more than a thousand Italian Percy Jackson fans, and nearly caused a riot as double the number queued unsuccessfully for a ticket.
When your son was first diagnosed, aged 10 or so, was he anxious about what it meant?
He was. Before he was diagnosed he didn’t know why he hated school, but he did. He would crawl under the dining room table and refuse to do his homework. So I used Percy Jackson in the ways that myths have always been used, to explain things that are difficult to explain. To say: you see the world in a slightly different way.
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