In 1959 Shirley was approached by the publishers Victor Gollancz to create her first picture book, something she’d long been considering after years of illustrating other people’s work. ‘I went back to an idea I had worked on years before of a very simple book about two small children going through an ordinary day. There were, surprisingly, not many of them around in those days.’ Continue reading
With a retrospective of the artist Edward Ardizzone opening at the House of Illustration this week, I wanted to showcase one of his lesser known works – Jean Webster’s 1912 classic Daddy Long-Legs. Jean Webster was the grand-niece of Mark Twain; a relationship that suggests literary nepotism but was in fact fraught with difficulties. Her father had … Continue reading
In 1982 Joan Aiken was asked to write a practical guide on the art of writing children’s books. From the first line it is clear that she wasn’t entirely sold on this concept (‘There is no one way to write for children’), but concedes that there are many practical things that a new writer can … Continue reading
We’ve been spoiled with some amazing books about children’s books lately. First came the essential Oxford Companion by Daniel Hahn, with three and a half thousand perfectly encapsulated entries on the entire history of children’s literature. Now comes a far more selective publication by Martin Salisbury, professor of illustration at the Cambridge school of art. … Continue reading
Let’s finish this third advent calendar where we began, with Dylan Thomas’s recollections of his childhood Christmas in Wales. ‘One Christmas was so much like the other, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I … Continue reading
Here's a special thing – a Christmas thriller by the author of Brighton Rock and The Third Man, drawn by the illustrator of Stig of the Dump and Little Tim, with a hero to rival Thomas or Ivor. The Little Steamroller was Graham Greene's final tale in a series about plucky little transporters. Following the … Continue reading
