Building Bridges Through Picture Books, by Pippa Goodhart

 As our world divides, and distrust between different peoples seems to be growing, our children need to learn to do better than us.  That will only come through understanding and communication between cultures.  This has set me thinking about the few occasions when my story text has been illustrated by an artist from a different culture.  

The first time was when I wrote a silly rhyming story about Three Little Ghosties who like to bully ghoulsies, witches and ogres.  They are about to scare a human child … when the child wakes up and scares them instead.  I had a particular British illustrator in mind for this book.  Colin Paine did these lovely roughs ...

 … but Bloomsbury appointed an Italian illustrator, Anna Cantone, to do the final illustrations.  She used collage to produce very ‘designery’ images (please excuse the badly lit photo!).  I wasn't sure about them to begin with.  And yet I’ve come to love them.  Why?  Well, largely because young children react to them so well!  (NB This book is now out of print).

I’ve had books illustrated, published and sold in South Korea, and those have surprised me by showing children who look more British than Korean to me. 

 I asked my fellow Picture Book Den contributors what experiences they had in working with writers or illustrators from other cultures, and only Jonathan Emmett had experience of working this way.  He told me …

It took three years to find a suitable illustrator for my picture book story The Santa Trap and I’d almost given up hope of ever finding one when my editor Emily Ford discovered Argentinian illustrator Poly Bernatene. Poly brought a distinctly South-American Gothic feel to the illustrations that was a perfect fit for the dark, cautionary tale.

Poly’s English is pretty good these days (and certainly puts my miserable Spanish to shame) but back then his wife Paula translated the story’s text and Emily’s email correspondence so that the language difference did not seem to present too much of a problem. We’ve since done three more books together and are hoping to do a fifth. Although Poly can sometimes interpret my words in a way that I hadn’t intended, this often leads to interesting and appealing results.

That highlights one obvious problem; language differences.  And yet translation of short texts isn't hard.  Perhaps there should be more cross-cultural cooperation?  

There is!  Tiny Owl Publishing have recently launched an exciting and innovative move to publish children’s picture books which ‘bridge cultures’, specifically between Iran and Britain.  They asked me to write a fable for an Iranian illustrator to work on.  So I wrote A Bottle of Happiness, and, remarkably quickly, there was my story made into the most beautiful and, to me, initially slightly strange images by Ehsan Abdollahi.

As with Three Little Ghosties, I wondered whether the style would be too sophisticated and strange to British children’s view, but not a bit of it!  More fool me for underestimating them.  Of course ALL styles, indeed the whole world, is new to a small child, so they naturally tend to be more open to new ideas than we adults might give them credit for. 

In our modern world, we need to know facts about each other, but I strongly believe that we also need to have a proper feel for, and familiarity with, each other’s worlds and outlooks.  We need to share cultures.  

My father, who was a lovely and wise man, used to say that the point of education was to give us more things in life to enjoy.  Well, having access to the beauty and insights of other cultures certainly gives us more things to enjoy.  So let’s give that joy to our children!

Tiny Owl picture books from Iran, by Pippa Goodhart

Early in 2013 I received an email out of the blue, asking me if I would be interested in doing some editing work on picture book texts for a new publisher.  It turned out to be an exciting opportunity, and a chance to do rather more than simply editing.  I reworked texts which had been translated into English from their original Persian.  

These are important books, several of them major prize winning ones, but which haven’t appeared in the British book market before. 

Iranian Delaram Ghanimifard set up the Tiny Owl publishing house in London with her husband - http://tinyowl.co.uk/  The first of Tiny Owl’s books are now published, and getting excellent reviews.

I want to show off some of the artwork to you.  You’ll see it’s refreshingly different from the current trends in British illustration.  The variety here demonstrates how illustrative art is clearly flourishing in Iran.  Take a look!

 

Little Black Fish is perhaps the odd one out in this group of books in that it isn’t aimed just at children.  It has quite a long text, and the story of the determined little fish that wants to see the world beyond its home pool is an allegory for the Iranian nation at times when it has been dangerous to make a stand for different ideas.  This story was written in 1968 by Samad Behrangi, and his death, rumoured to have been ordered by the Iranian Government, has given him, and this story, legendary status.  The pictures are by Farshid Mesghali.

Do take a look look on the Tiny Owl website to see more about these books, and about them as publishers.