Sam Copeland has the rumpled look and exhausted air one would expect from a man who has been entertaining hundreds of primary school students all day, a tough call for anyone. But Copeland has given himself an extra task, which generally starts every school trip off with much hilarity — explaining the meaning of the Yiddish word “tuchus”.
“We ask for volunteers,” he explains “and there is team Topps and then there’s team Tuchus and then I’ll say ‘OK great, so you’re on team Tuchus, just to let you know that’s the Jewish word for bum, so you’re on team bum.’”
The teams are so named, I should explain because Agatha Topps and Lenny Tuchus are the heroes of the book he’s co-written with Jenny Pearson, The Underpants of Chaos. Tuchus and Topps team up to investigate the mysterious events at their school, Little Strangehaven Primary, events which conjure up bands of military chickens and bouts of uncontrollable ball-dancing.
9780241521069 The Underpants of Chaos - final cover
Lenny is most definitely Jewish, an identity mostly defined via a diet of chicken soup and matzah balls, plus a mum who calls him Lenny Loo Loo. Plus there’s the name, which Lenny has to explain how to pronounce. This level — and this type — of Jewish representation in books for a younger age group is more unusual than it should be, and Copeland’s editor said that he couldn’t remember reading a British middle grade book with a Jewish central character that wasn’t a Holocaust book.
“I’ve desperately been trying to prove him wrong,” says Copeland. “Certainly I can’t find a book published in the last 10 years.
“I think there are probably American books. America is a different story. They’re pretty well catered for. But Britain?” There are loads of fantastic Jewish middle grade writers in this country, he adds. “But I just don’t know whether it’s how Jews in this country, we just want to fit in, to get on with things. And… I don’t know whether that seeped into our children’s writing.”
I know several Jewish children’s writers who have been told that there is no market for non-Holocaust books about Jewish kids, I tell him. He thinks we shouldn’t worry about that.
“No other sort of diverse group sits there and worries about whether there’s a market for their stories. You know, trans rights, for instance, that has been absolutely driven by the desire to see all people represented in fiction. So why not Jews?”
Copeland knows a lot more about the wider market for books than most writers, as his day job is as a literary agent — a very successful one, shortlisted for Literary Agent of the Year at the 2020 and 2021 British Book Awards and named as one of The Bookseller’s most influential people in publishing in 2020. Among his clients are Alex Michaelides whose book The Silent Patient has been in the New York Times bestseller list for nearly 100 weeks, Holly Jackson, current queen of British Young Adult fiction, Magnus Mills, whose debut The Restraint of Beasts was shortlisted for the Booker, and Simon Mayo, the radio presenter turned author. He also represents Thomas Keneally, the author of Schindler’s List. And then there’s Jenny Pearson, his co-writer for the Tuchus and Topps book It started as a lockdown project where they’d write a chapter each and send them back to each other. “At that time in lockdown, where we were all sort of facing doom and we were all searching around for light wherever it will be.” And a book stuffed with jokes and silliness was what came out of the process.
He grew up in Manchester – going to King David primary and then Manchester Grammar – and after university moved to London with no clear idea as to his future. He took a job in a Notting Hill bookshop, because he loved books. “And after about three years I thought, I need a career.” He thought of publishing, but someone suggested becoming an agent instead. “He said: ‘That’s where all the power lies.’ And at the word power, my brain lit up. I was lucky, I sent out one letter to one agency. And I just struck lucky and I got a job as an assistant. And the rest is history.”
He is sent roughly 5,000 manuscripts a year and of those he might take on three or four new writers. What makes a book stand out? “When you pick it up almost immediately you forget that you’re reading a submission. And you’re like, ‘Ah, here is a writer who’s in control.’ And I feel like I’m reading a book.”
His own writing came later, partly as a result of having his own three children and reading to them when they were young (“I was thinking, ‘Yeah, I could do this’”) and partly from going into therapy. “The therapist said to me, you might find an artistic outpouring during this process, and I remember scoffing and then literally four months later, I was like, ‘Oh.’”
And then he celebrated his tenth anniversary in his job, and that day he started writing. “So it was all those three things coming together.”
But once he’d finished writing it he sent it out anonymously to agents. “The lie that I tell is that well, I wanted to show that it was a fair crack of the whip… the truth is that I was I had no idea what I was writing was any good at all. And I just envisaged my book being sent around publishing, like, look what Sam Copeland’s written there, it’s rubbish. So I did it out of fear really is the truth.” Happily he had nothing to worry about. His debut, Charlie Changes into a Chicken — the first of a series — was phenomenally successful, getting multiple foreign deals and shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize.
Author Photo - credit Charlotte Knee
Sam Copeland - and chicken (photo Charlotte Knee)
“I remember walking down the street. And I think I just received the first offer from Penguin. And I remember standing in the street, pumping my fist with excitement. And that’s it. It’s a rare feeling.”
Had being a writer made him a better agent? “I think it’s made me more acutely aware of what an anxiety- provoking experience being published is. Because people think it is a dream come true. And in a sense, it is a dream come true. But it is also a nerve-wracking experience being published. It’s alerted me to the stresses that authors are under. It’s not stress like firemen and ambulance men experience, but it’s not the easiest job in the world.”
One aspect of the job though, he adores. The school visits. When he first realised he’d have to do them he worried: “And it turns out, that’s the bit of the whole process that I enjoy the most. It’s just a constant joy.”
And now part of that joy involves standing up in front of hundreds of kids, explaining that he’s Jewish and what the word “tuchus” means. “I did feel a bit funny,” he says. “But actually, it’s really good when we come out. Because actually, kids are great.”
The Underpants of Chaos by Sam Copeland and Jenny Pearson is published by Puffin (£7.99)
