Kate Greenaway Award: Rediscovering a Friend

Yesterday I spent the day working out of the studio.

It was all because of a surprise phone call I got a couple of months back, from someone I've not seen in quite a few years...

Tom Barber is the librarian at Ellis Guilford secondary school, in Nottingham, but he is also an author. These days he is working on a novel but, several years ago, we published a picture book together, called Open Wide!. It was all about a little boy who is scared of going to the dentist.

We did a sequel too, Playground Prairie. Sadly that one never got as far as the bookshops: it stumbled and fell at the last post. 

I got all the artwork finished and approved. Publication day was looming invitingly, when suddenly the publisher, Chrysalis, got into financial difficulties. They eventually got bought out, but our project (along with various others I'm sure) was shelved, as sometimes happens in these circumstances. Very sad (and not a little frustrating). But I digress...

Anyway, as part of his role at Ellis Guilford, Tom has organised for their feeder primary schools to shadow this year's Kate Greenaway award: a medal given for the most outstanding children's book, in terms of illustration. So, Tom asked me to be part of the project.

36 children from 6 primary schools were hand-picked to be 'ambassadors': to spend the day with Tom, his college Kathryn and I at Ellis Guilford, learning about the Greenaway Award and about book illustration, then feed everything back to their schools, and get as many children as possible to vote for their favourite.

There are 8 shortlisted books but, because we had only one day, we decided to focus on just 3: Ernest by Catherine Raynor, Jim by Mini Grey and Farther by Graham Barker-Smith. 

My job was to explain about how books are illustrated, then devise and run workshops based on our 3 shortlisted choices. Using all kinds of media, we created amazing flying machines, designed maps of the schools with lots of very silly rules and even invented strange, new creatures. 

Tom looked at how stories can be told through pictures, how to write reviews and reading aloud. He also introduced them all to the shadowing website where all the shortlisted illustrators talk about their work.

I was a totally full-on day: we scarcely had time to draw breath between sessions, but everything seemed to go pretty smoothly and all the children said they had great fun.

Thanks Tom, for inviting me to be a part of the project, and thank you to all the Y9 helpers from Ellis Guilford, without whom it simply wouldn't have been possible.