In case you haven't heard yet, the newly announced Children's Laureate is picture book Author & Illustrator Anthony Browne. He will hold the post for the next 2 years. He is most famous for his Gorilla books. I did a blog all about him and his work a while ago, after I heard him give a really interesting talk.
The Children's Laureate is a relatively recent idea, begun in 1999, and Anthony Browne is only the 6th so far. He takes over from Michael Rosen.
I got to do this surreptitious sketch of Micheal Rosen when he happened to be sitting in front of me at a conference:The Children's Laureate's role is to be an ambassador for children's books, in whichever way takes their fancy. It will be interesting to see what an illustrator chooses to emphasise. The only other illustrator was the very first laureate, the legendary Quentin Blake:
All we know so far is that, unsurprisingly, Anthony Browne intends to use his time to focus on the appreciation of picture books."Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older," he said.
I couldn't agree more!
4 comments:
It will be interesting to see how he is going to promote the picturebook. Hopefully he will be able to encourage many moe people to buy books.
I just loved his interview on BBC where he shared about the shape game. I used to play that with my dad when I was little.
Yes, he demo'd that at the talk I went to as well.
I love picture books for all ages, in fact I'd buy a book for it's pictures rather than the story. I did that with Posy Simmonds' but ened up enjoying the story too! - Double bonus! I want more picture books for adults that aren't just sci-fi comics!
So true.
I do find some graphic novels very visually interesting, but they can be extremely mysogenistic and violent at times. We women need to get writing them instead!
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