Fashion writer swaps stilettos for saddles

Well-known NZ fashion reporter Stacy Gregg has turned her hand to writing children’s fiction. Gregg, a keen horse rider as a young woman, noticed a gap in the market for well written pony stories for the 8 to 12 age group. “There were a couple of modern [pony centric] series that I found truly awful,” she said in a NZ Herald interview. “The writers seemed to know nothing about horses and they didn’t have any genuine passion for them. And I found the only really good horse books for girls like me were written way back in the ’50s. So I knew there was room in the genre.” Harper Collins UK has already published the first two books in Gregg’s 8-book Pony Club Secrets series, which was launched in the Commonwealth  market this month. Gregg has also sold the German rights to the series and is fielding calls regarding film rights. Her first two books – Mystic and the Midnight Ride and Blaze and the Dark Rider – are currently numbers 12 and 15 on the children’s top 30 books chart at WHSmith, a prominent UK bookseller chain.