Francesca Lombardo

A journalist who kept hearing a bus

Francesca Lombardo is a journalist and writer. She lives and works in London.

After earning a Master’s degree in journalism at the London College of Communication, she worked as an editor at Ink Publishing and then as a freelance print and television journalist, specialising in film and A-list talent interviews and in the overseas property market. Along the way she set up several media companies.

Her work has been published by British, Irish and Italian national newspapers and magazines — the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, The Telegraph, the Sunday Business Post, the Sunday Times, the Sunday Express, Repubblica, Vogue, Vogue Casa and CNBC Magazine among them.

She is the author of the children’s book series Beatrice and the London Bus, which grew out of a simple question a child asked her about why nobody ever thanks the bus. Three volumes have been published so far, along with an all-in-one edition, and she is currently writing the Halloween edition of the series.

Children do not need a fantasy world invented for them. They need someone to point at the one they already live in and say: look, that building has a face.

School visits and festivals

Francesca visits primary schools, libraries and book festivals to read from the series and run short workshops on inventing a character out of something you walk past every day. Sessions run for forty to sixty minutes and work best with Years 2 to 5.