He ended up getting the third highest mark in Year 12.' 'The thing about kids with dyslexia is they are really creative and intelligent kids, they just need to be shown a new way of looking at words. Newton's first book, My Name is Will Thompson, draws on his brother's struggles with dyslexia, a learning challenge that affects reading and writing. In my days off from the fire brigade I just started writing a bit more seriously, and I went from there.' You are really good at it', and nobody had really said that to me before. He rang me up one night and said, 'Look, you've got to get serious about your writing. I'd send a little chapter a month to my brother, and it grew from there. 'Slowly these letters morphed into stories. To get over that, I started to make stuff up in my letters, mainly to make my life sound more interesting.

I discovered I was a really bad letter writer, I could hardly fill a page of words to send to my own brother. 'About 20 years ago I started writing when my younger brother Chris moved to Switzerland. I wanted to give her a life after that incident.'

I wrote it for me in a lot of ways to help me make sense of all that, but I also wrote it for that girl. What made it worse was we never found out what happened to the mum, it didn't look good, and I didn't find out what happened to the little girl. 'Sitting beside her was her seven-year-old daughter and she was sitting there in pink pyjamas with white bunny rabbits, I remember that, holding her mum's hand and sobbing,' Newton recounts. Newton knows all this from his job as a firefighter with Melbourne's Metropolitan Fire Brigade, having once been called to attend a woman who had overdosed in those very towers. that there are kids out there who are struggling.' 'It is equally important that those kids who come from a more privileged background who don't really want for anything know. 'Books like Mr Romanov lets them know they are not alone and sometimes all it takes is a moment or one person to change things.

When We Were Two by Robert Newton