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Take a look at our selection of hot new releases and popular kids' books and let us know which titles and covers catch your eyes. There are so many amazing new kids books coming in 2016!

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WaterBridge Outreach: Books + Water recently announced the books in English they have selected this year for donation to the different schools and libraries they support around the world.  WaterBridge Outreach is a non-profit that seeks … Continue reading ... →

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Trees are so much a part of our daily lives, whether we take them for granted or find ourselves fighting for their survival: so it is perhaps unsurprising that there are many stories from all over the world that feature trees, woods or forests as a central theme or ‘character’… … Continue reading ... →

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The Promise
written by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Laura Carlin
(Walker Books, 2013)

 

Set in a grim, grey, arid urban landscape where ‘Nothing grew. Everything was broken. … Continue reading ... →

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The tiniest creatures accomplish some of the biggest jobs on the planet.

This beautifully illustrated and cleverly written guide invites us into the microscopic world of microbes.

Zoologist and author Nicola Davies welcomes us into the microscopic world in her book Tiny Creatures The world of Microbes. 

Taking us on a journey through a microbe’s minute size, to their multiplying sills turning one microbe into millions, to their diverse shape forms, and the variety roles they play in the world, Tiny Creatures in an invitation to go exploring.

 

Using wonderful and clear analogies such as an antenna on an ant would need to be as big as a whale to see all the micro-organisms on its antenna. This book is beautifully illustrated by Emily Sutton and brings to life all of the amazing and cool facts about microbes. It supports the text wonderfully.

Davies focuses on the positive things that microbes do such as composting soil, making yogurt and helping to make our air good and clean to breathe.

We really like the part about germs which make us sick, how they multiply and how to prevent illness from happening in the first place.

I really loved this book because it leaves its readers in a state of wonder and has us wanting to know more about the invisible world of microbes.

Something To Do

How to Compost

In her book Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes author Nicola Davies shares with us that one of the ways microbes do their finest work is breaking down dead material into soil. Composting is one of the easiest ways to see this work up close. You, along with those microbes are going to create rich soil called humus to put into your garden.

• Composting creates soil for plants filled with nutrients they need to flourish
• Compost is made from items you usually throw away in your home.
• Composting is Earth friendly as it reduces the garbage we send to the landfill.

Here’s how it works:

When organic scraps ( think green and brown) are put into a compost bin, the combination of nitrogen and carbon invite tiny microbes, insects, and worms to break down the organic matter into soil. This is called decomposition. The rich nutrient filled soil is called humus.

What Can You Put into a Compost Bin

1. Greens (Nitrogen) All vegetable and fruit produce, grass clippings, coffee grounds, and weeds that haven’t gone to seed.

2. Browns (Carbon) Dried leaves, paper towel/toilet paper rolls, newspaper, cardboard, paper egg cartons, and saw dust.

Other: I also throw in egg shells into my compost. It’s not a green or a brown but it breaks down wonderfully.

Keep a 50/50 balance of brown and greens in your compost bin.

3. Water  Compost needs water so that the microbes, insects, and worms can do their thing.

4. Air: Compost piles need air. If your compost bin is made our of chicken wire, no problem. If you have a closed container, you’ll need to stir it every few weeks with a compost stir pick.

How to make an easy Compost Bin

Once your compost bin has been built and you’ve started adding scraps and water to it, see how soon it is before you start seeing potato bugs, little flies, worms etc. Mark on a calendar daily what you see and how long it takes for the compost scraps to break down into humus.

Has your family tried composting and putting your own Tiny Microbes to work?

Would you like to discover more fun and nature-filled activities for your family?

How about some month-by-month activities based on the classic children’s tale, The Secret Garden? A Year in the Secret Garden is over 120 pages, with 150 original color illustrations and 48 activities for your family and friends to enjoy, learn, discover and play with together. A Year In the Secret Garden is our opportunity to introduce new generations of families to the magic of this classic tale in a modern and innovative way that creates special learning and play times outside in nature. This book encourages families to step away from technology and into the kitchen, garden, reading nook and craft room. Learn more, or grab your copy HERE.

The post Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes appeared first on Jump Into A Book.

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It’s a new year, and that means we have more glorious books to rave about!  This month’s picks will spark creativity, help kids understand the experiences of others and take them on journeys to secret underground caves.

For Pre-K to 1st Grade (Ages 1 – 6)

Not a Box written and illustrated by Antoinette Portis

How can you write a whole book about a box? Because it’s not a box – it’s so much more! The rabbit in this cleverly simple board book is asked repeatedly why it is sitting in, standing on, spraying, and wearing a box. Each page reveals what the rabbit’s imagination has turned the box into, from a mountain to a race car to a hot air balloon. This entertaining story is perfect for an interactive read aloud to help inspire kids to use their own imagination. Just make sure you have an empty box ready after you finish!

For Grades 1st – 3rd (Ages 5-8)

The Black Book of Colors written by Menena Cottin and illustrated by Rosana Faría

What would it be like to be blind? This inventive book helps children think about how they might experience the world and its colors if they used only their senses of touch, taste, smell, and hearing. Readers can run their hands over the raised black drawings printed on black paper, and feel the braille letters stamped into the page. They hear about the taste of red, the smell of brown, the feel of blue, and so on. A unique and richly rewarding reading experience!

For Grades 3 – 5 (Ages 7-10)

The Lion Who Stole My Arm written by Nicola Davies

This is the wonderfully suspenseful story of a boy in rural Africa who loses his arm in a lion attack. His goal is to find and kill the lion who took his arm. Then he meets a team of researchers who teach him how they use science to track lions and change his understanding of the lions’ relationship with his village. Short and satisfying, this is an engaging story (great for reluctant readers) about adapting to life with a disability and understanding the value of species and habitat conservation.

For Grades 6+ (Ages 11 and up)

Fourth Down and Inches: Concussions and Football’s Make or Break Moment written by Carla Killough McClafferty

The knowledge that playing football can cause serious brain injury is not new. In 1905, no less than nineteen football players died from playing the sport and anti-football sentiment almost wiped it out of play. So, how and why did it continue on, becoming America’s most popular sport? This eye-opening work of nonfiction helps readers understand how football gained the popularity it has today and why it’s still the subject of heated debates about safety. A fascinating mix of science and history!

For Grades 6+ (Ages 11 and up):

The Secret of Priest’s Grotto: A Holocaust Survival Story written by Peter Lane Taylor and Christos Nicola

Underneath the fields of Western Ukraine, a dark labyrinth of caves crisscross back and forth for 340 miles. The passages contain an astonishing story of despair, loyalty, and ultimately, survival. This captivating piece of nonfiction follows a team of modern cave divers as they unearth the previously unknown story of several Jewish families who lived within the cave system for over a year during Nazi occupation and the holocaust. Along with harrowing narration from the actual survivors, readers can follow the explorers underground and into the past, to witness one family’s extraordinary fight to survive.

The post Our Favorite Books for January appeared first on First Book Blog.

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by Nicola Davies and Laura Carlin (Candlewick, 2014)

The Promise is on this year’s New York Times Best Illustrated Books list and I’m so glad it captured a spot. I imagine weeping and gnashing of teeth to pare down a year into a handful of notables, but they got this one so right.

Here you have bleakness. Bare and raw. And a girl who doesn’t have much but the desolate things. The words themselves pierce the brightness.

The people, too, dry and dusty.

And then.

Some seeds and a promise and a reluctant okay.

I pushed aside the mean and hard and ugly, and I planted, planted, planted.

Everything works in this book. The text is exquisite. The pictures haunting and heartbreaking and hopeful. The paper is luxurious. The case cover differs from the jacket itself. Dig in. Look around. Don’t miss the endpapers that start as stone and end as spring.

There’s a little Frog Belly Rat Bone here, in this fragile world in need of color and life.

(Also, there’s a lot of great stuff about this beautiful book here, and this post is so, so lovely as well.)

And PS! Add a comment by Wednesday, December 3rd to this post for a chance at winning all ten of those books from Chronicle. Don’t forget your pledge to #GiveBooks this year!

 

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The New York Times Book Review has unveiled its annual list of the “10 Best Illustrated Children’s Books” of the year.

Shelf Awareness children’s editor Jennifer M. Brown, Caldecott Medal-winning artist Brian Floca, and Caldecott Medal recipient Jerry Pinkney sat on this year’s judging panel. See the complete list below.

Here’s more from the press release: “Since 1952, the Book Review has convened an independent panel of three judges from the world of children’s literature to select picture books on the basis of artistic merit. Each year, judges choose from among thousands of picture books for what is the only annual award of its kind. Lists of past winners of the Best Illustrated Children’s Book Award can be found on NYTimes.com/Books, along with a slide show of this year’s winners.”

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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I don’t know about you, but in our family, 99% of bedtime reading involves fiction.

Non fiction, or information books, rarely get chosen to share a cosy cuddle just before the kids go to sleep. But Tiny: The Invisible World of Microbes by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Emily Sutton has recently helped us break the mould.

You want to share an amazing journey with your kids? You want stunning illustrations to enjoy pouring over together? You want to finish the book with a sigh of satisfaction, a sense of coming full circle and feeling that your world and understanding of it just got a little bit richer? Well, Tiny has been doing all of that for us, and more.

An exploration of life so small you need a microscope to see it, Davies and Sutton take a few clever hooks, and quickly reel you in. Through a perfect fusion of words and images they explain the scale and scope of microscopic life, not only powerfully, but also with real beauty. Judicious use of mind boggling facts (for example, how many microbes you might find in a teaspoon of soil) leave lots of space for awe, wonder and curiosity, without ever overloading a young reader/listener.

Davies has composed a beautiful “story” in the sense that there is a beginning, middle and end, with a dramatic turn at one point (what bad microbes can do to you) and a reassuring, rewarding ending where different strands come together. Sutton’s detailed, earthy-toned illustrations are clever and sprinkled with humour. She can pull of both minutia and epic vistas with equal skill.

A glorious introduction to the variety of microbes, and the impact they have on our lives, this stunning book is not only a delight to read and look at, it will leave parents and children asking each other more questions, and wanting to further explore the unseen world around them.

To “see” microbes at work we decided to give making compost in a bottle a try. Here’s the recipe we followed:

‘Ingredients’

Clear 2ltr plastic bottle with lid

Fruit and vegetable peelings

Grass clippings/leaves

Garden soil

Shredded newspaper

Water

Tape

Scissors

Permanent marker

Method
1. Cut around the bottle neck to form a flip top lid (the bottle neck alone will not be large enough to pour the ingredients into the bottle)
2. Layer the ingredients in a repeating pattern until you reach the flip top lid level. The pattern we followed was soil, fruit/vegetable scraps, soil, newspaper, soil, grass clippings, soil, fruit vegetable scraps etc. Each layer was 3-5 cm deep.
3. Moisten the contents of the bottle with a little bit of water.
4. Tape the top of the bottle closed.
5. Mark the top of the compost on the side of the bottle.

6. Place your mini composters in a sunny spot.
7. Once a week observe any changes eg in the level or appearance of compost. Depending on local conditions in 3-6 weeks you’ll see a marked change in the contents of the bottle.

After 5 weeks we decided to open up our bottles, the level of compost having dropped by about 10 cm.

The newspaper was nowhere to be seen, many of the vegetable scraps had disappeared (only the larger chunks of carrot were still visible), and whilst the grass was still visible, it had clearly changed.

I tried to convince my girls that what they had just observed was a magic trick: leftover kitchen and garden waste along with our daily newspaper went in, and out came (something well on its way to being) nutrient-rich fertilizer..

I have to admit, this magic trick didn’t have the instant wow factor of some magic tricks they’ve seen in their life times, but the potion making aspect of the original layering of ingredients, and the clearly changed form of the bottle contents did pique their curiosity.

We didn’t have music on whilst making our compost, but here are some fun songs that go well with a book all about microbes:

Germs by Ozomatli (listen for free here on YouTube)

Microbe Hunter by Monty Harper (listen for free here on Harper’s website)

Bacteria Party (you can listen to this very funky song for free here on Richard Quarle’s website)

Virus Bug Blues (again, available to listen to for free here on Richard Quarle’s website)

If I were based in a school doing this compost activity, I’d definitely look into making this Compost Musical with my class.

Other activities which would go well with reading Tiny: The Invisible World of Microbes include:

Making your own yoghurt. Microbes are used to ferment milk from which yoghurt is made. Here’s one set of instructions that you could follow to get some microbes working on your behalf in your kitchen.

Learning more about microbes from some great online sites designed for kids. We particularly like this video and this mini-site from the Children’s University of Manchester.

Cuddling up to some microbes. We own a few of these lovely soft toys made by giantmicrobes.co.uk.

Investigating how yeast works. The microbes in yeast react to different environments, and this experiment from education.com shows you how you could investigate what yeast microbes like and dislike.

What non fiction books have you shared recently with your kids?

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from the publishers.

Every Monday is a celebration of all things non-fiction in the online children’s book world. If you’d like to read more reviews of children’s non-fiction books, do take a look at the dedicated children’s non-fiction blog: http://nonfictionmonday.wordpress.com/

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If you were trying to support and encourage a young environmentalist, feminist or …anarchist (!) what books would you suggest for them?

I might give the newly re-issued Barbapapa’s Ark, or the simple but very effective What are you playing at?

Or if you were simply looking for a great read for your kids about making the world more peaceful and fairer where would you turn?

I might suggest The Arrival or The Island.

And if I were looking for more thought provoking books (as indeed I always am), I’d turn to the Little Rebels Children’s Book Award. Now in its second year, this is an award for radical fiction for children aged 0-12. Last year’s winner was the marvellous and moving Azzi in Between by Sarah Garland (my review can be found here), and this year’s winner will be announced in just a couple of week’s time.

The books, authors and illustrators in the running of the Little Rebels Children’s Book Award 2014 are:

The Promise by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Laura Carlin

After Tomorrow by Gillian Cross

The Middle of Nowhere by Geraldine McCaughrean

Moon Bear by Gill Lewis

Real Lives: Harriet Tubman by Deborah Chancellor

Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty, illustrated by David Roberts

Stay Where You Are and Then Leave by John Boyne

I recently put a pretty tricky question to those authors who made it onto the shortlist:

If it were possible with a wave of a wand what would you change about the way the world works, to make it either more inclusive, less discriminatory, or a place which was more just and equitable?

Here’s how they replied…

Nicola Davies
Tricky. I have one practical thing and one that you really would need a magic wand for. The practical one is to make sure that every girl on the planet gets and education; women with confidence, education and power are the single biggest force for change.

And the magic wand one is to give all bankers, politicians, drug lords…all those in positrons of power over others to see the consequences of each of their actions on the wider world, as clearly as a movie and to feel them, as physical pain. I think that might be really helpful.

Deborah Chancellor
This one’s easy. I’d make sure half the people in every single profession were women. With my magic wand, fifty percent of all politicians, judges, business chiefs, religious leaders, generals (etc) would be female. Without a doubt, the world would be a fairer, more inclusive and generally more harmonious place. Perhaps one day we’ll make this utopia happen, but we’re still a long way off.

Andrea Beaty
I would create shoes that would transport people into the lives of others to show how their actions and attitudes affect other people. Many of the world’s problems would quickly straighten out if people who take advantage of others or inflict suffering upon others would have to walk a mile in the shoes of the people they disrespect, harm, or disregard. Perhaps Rosie Revere could invent the walk-a-mile shoes. She is very clever! Until we have walk-a-mile shoes, though, we have literature. It lets us each see the world through other people’s eyes. To walk a mile in their shoes. It gives us empathy. And that is more powerful than any magic wand.

Gillian Cross
If I could take one action to make the world fairer and more equal I would make education available and affordable for all children across the world, especially girls.

Gill Lewis
I would wave wand to enable us to be able to change our skin with people and animals…to walk a mile in their shoes…or hooves!

In Harper Lee’s story, To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus gives Scout a piece of moral advice;
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Most prejudice or discrimination is born of ignorance, indifference and fear of the unknown. To truly understand another’s situation is to live their life, to see the world from their point of view. I would extend this to animals too, for us to live an animal’s life; to live as elephant, an eagle or a honeybee and to be able to see the adverse effects we humans have on the natural world and to understand the consequences of our actions.

Unfortunately we don’t have magic wands, but we have the next best thing…books!

Books transport us into other worlds and give us some insight and understanding of others’ lives.

Until I find that magic wand, I’ll keep reading and writing books!

************

Unfortunately Geraldine McCaughrean and John Boyne were not able to take part; I would have been very interested to hear what they might have chosen to do with a wave of a wand.

And as for me? What would I magic up? I found myself nodding wildly at all the responses above, but if I were to offer something different here’s what I might conjure up: If looking just at the bookworld, I’d get rid of gendered marketing and watch with great interest to see how it shakes up (or otherwise) book sales. On a bigger scale, I’d ban private car ownership, and invest massively in public transport. It would do wonders for not only environmental health, but also personal well being I believe. And if I could move mountains, I’d change how economies work so they don’t have to be predicated on consumption.

What would you do with a wave of your wand to make the world a better place?

If you are after further interesting reading matter to foster your own little rebels, you might enjoy looking through this list of books for children and young people as compiled on the Marxist Internet Archive. “Some of these books were written to be expressly radical, and others need a stretch to find political implications.” Thanks go to Betsy Bird for alerting me to this bibliography.

Little Rebels Children’s Book Award is given by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers and administered by Letterbox Library and the winner will be announced at the London Radical Bookfair on May 10th 2014.

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Nicola Davies is many things. A zoologist, a writer, a singer, an ambassador, a past presenter of a children’s wildlife programme on TV. With over 30 books to her name, from an especially entertaining non-fiction series illustrated by Neal Layton, to novels, picture books, and poetry (the jewel in the crown that is A First Book of Nature, illustrated by Mark Heard), she is also someone who can make people cry.

At a publisher’s event where I was meant to be being terribly professional, she handed me her new picture book, The Promise, illustrated by Laura Carlin, and I was floored.

Well, wouldn’t you be with a picture book which opens with a mugging?

I won’t say more about The Promise, other than that the tears were profoundly good tears, and if I had to sum it up, I’d describe the book as one part Melvin Burgess, one part Rachel Carson. Now that’s quite something for a picture book, don’t you think?

I recently asked Nicola about her new book, and – more broadly – about the issues that drive her to write, and here’s how our conversation flowed:

Playing by the book: Your new book, The Promise, is “a picture book about transformation, the transformation of landscapes [...], the transformation of human hearts and the possibility of change“. Can you tell us a little more about the book, how it came into being, and what you hope it might achieve?

Nicola Davies: It’s a bit of a saga… My wonderful and best beloved editor at Walker, Caroline Royds (who is responsible for more wonderful books than any other editor of her generation) asked me if I’d be interested in writing a picture book version of The Man Who Planted Trees [by Jean Giono/PBTB]. I knew the book very well but hadn’t read it for years.

I re-read it and loved it all over again but knew that a) I didn’t want to retell someone else’s story, as it felt like a species of theft, and also I’m an author – so I have a fairly substantial ego – and I wanted something that was mine and b) I felt I wanted to write something for a modern world where most people live in urban or semi-urban situations.

For my research on Gaia Warriors [a book Nicola has written about climate change, with an afterword by James Lovelock/PBTB] I’d read about and talked to a lot of people involved in planting and preserving forest around the world so I knew I lot about the role of trees in regulating our atmosphere and also about the amazing transformation that they can bring about in local climate in urban and desert situations, bringing down temperatures and creating rainfall. So all of that was in my mind like soup.

But at the time I was also not well; I had a big and very horrible shoulder injury, and was up to my frontal lobes in hideous painkillers, so I went for a week’s holiday (something I don’t really do much) and just lay in the sun for a week. I wasn’t even consciously thinking of the book I would write. However, I got back, sat at my desk and knew this was The Day.

I didn’t make notes. I didn’t think. I just wrote and in about three hours I had The Promise. I rang Cas, read it to her and I realised the silence on the other end of the phone was her crying. Since then I think we’ve dropped one line, but everything else has remained unchanged.

One of the reasons I feel so unrestrained about singing the praises of my own book this time, is that it feels like it almost came from somewhere else and down my arm. I know in my SOUL that it has a really important and powerful message that can work across all age groups. When A First Book of Nature was published, I said in my speech at the launch that it had important work to do in the world, helping parents and children to reconnect with the simple profound joys of nature.

But I think The Promise has an even wider message, not just about our relationship with the environment but our relationship with ourselves, and that we can change; that a bad beginning doesn’t have to dictate a bad end. Something that I’ve seen the best teachers in the most deprived areas trying to convey to their pupils and a message that comes up again and again in my fiction.

Playing by the book: Yes, I couldn’t agree more.

Listening to your passion, would it be fair to describe you as a campaigner as well as an author?

Nicola Davies: I wouldn’t describe myself as a campaigner. I’m too much on the sidelines. I have been more involved politically and environmentally in the past. But I just get too upset and too angry and then I don’t help.

So telling stories that speak to ‘one heart at a time’ is the best way I can use what I am and what I can do with my life. I wish I’d seen that 20 years ago!

I hope The Promise is going to be the first of a line of picture books with big messages that work across ages. I’ve always said I would rather write one picture book that speaks to a generation than win the Booker, and that’s absolutely true; the problem with picture books is getting them out there, getting people to know about them.

So little children’s writing gets a serious review in the UK press. When the children’s entries for the Costa were reviewed on Radio 4 the presenters thought it was acceptable to say they hadn’t bothered to read them!

If we are supposed to value children and want them to read, then surely the most important writing is for children, and that writing should be valued?

Playing by the book: I couldn’t agree more with you Nicola! Perhaps we should campaign on this together?!

But actually, when I mentioned being a campaigner, I was thinking of your work for the World Land Trust. Can you tell us a little about your role as a World Land Trust Ambassador – what the charity does, and why you want to be involved with them.

Nicola Davies: I’ve been giving the WLT [World Land Trust] the lion’s share of my PLR [Public Lending Right - a fee which goes to authors, generated by their books being borrowed in UK/Eire public libraries/PBTB] for years. But I was incredibly flattered when they asked me to be an ambassador. This simply involves telling people about what they do. I wish I was truly famous then I could tell more people but I do what I can.

They’re such a simply ‘does what it says on the tin’ organisation. They work with the people who live with forests and wildlife to protect both. Sometimes that means buying the land, sometimes it means working carefully within existing and quite legally and culturally complex systems of indigenous land ownership, but it’s never top-down conservation, never the westerner telling the ‘natives’ what to do. And its incredibly successful. I think it’s very telling that WLT is the only conservation organisation that dear, lovely David Attenborough endorses.

I worked with WLT to research my book The Elephant Road, based very closely on their work in the Garo hills in NE India to safeguard elephant habitat and forest based livelihoods for local people.

Then I went to Borneo to see the amazing work WLT are doing with Borneo based organisation Hutan to make a continuous corridor of forest along the Kinabatangan river. It is really heartening to hear how committed the Bornean locals are to find ways to keep their forests, their wildlife and clean up their rivers. Of course the founders, Viv and John Burton, know all my old colleagues from the BBC Natural History Unit so it feels like going back to my roots sometimes too.

Playing by the book: Your passion for the natural world started when you were young, and you’ve argued – as have others who care about our environment – that our “passion for the natural world goes right back to our childhood“. How do we / can we engage young people with the natural world, when all the evidence suggests children are spending less and less time outside?

Nicola Davies: I think parents’ perception of danger is a big factor here. When I was a kid, I had scabs on my knees ALL the time. I was always bumping myself or cutting myself and nobody ever made a fuss. It was part of being a kid. I was allowed lots of unsupervised time, to just bum about in the garden or the fields and BE. Actually statistically not much has changed since the 60s; there is not a paedophile behind every bush and dealing with risk – for both adult and child – is an essential part of being human.

Richard Louv, an American author and campaigner (a real one), published a wonderful book called Last Child In the Woods all about the value of just BEING in wild or semi wild place, and what happens to kids who don’t get it. Its a must-read for anyone who cares about this stuff or who has children.

So my advice? Cut back on the activities and let a bit of your garden get messy and overgrown, so your kids can crawl about in the brambles and make a den out of a rusty old bit of tin roof – and just let them get on with it!

Playing by the book: Was there much time for books in your childhood or were you always outdoors?

Nicola Davies: I was the youngest of 3 by a decade. My parents were old to have me and my mum was sick from the time I was 2. But we always had gardens – my dad and grandpa were great gardeners and countrymen so there were veg plots and flowers – and I was left to roam in them. I was also very bright and a bit weird, I suppose. I didn’t make friends easily (I still don’t) so I was very, very solitary (my mum made cakes and sandwiches for my 6th birthday party and nobody came…really NOBODY).

SO, when I learned to read I LIVED the books I read. And when I was outdoors I was trailing around talking to myself singing invented songs and making up some bonkers story. Really – perhaps it’s no wonder I didn’t have any friends!

As an adolescent (we’d moved to Suffolk by then) I got kind of obsessed with landscape, and I’d walk in the fields staring at the shape of them and how they fitted together. I wanted passionately to be able to paint landscapes. I remember reading The Lost Domain by Alain Fournier at 17 and wanting to paint that sense of mystery into the rolling West Suffolk hills around me.

My parents fostered my love of literature. They came from working class families in Wales where music and literature were very valued. My Dad taught me Keats poems, and whole sections of Longfellow’s Hiawatha, and my Mum bought me Thomas Hardy and DH Lawrence’s animal poems. My Dad played the Dies Ire from Verde’s Requiem at ear-bleeding volume every Sunday morning, and Kathleen Ferrier singing Blow the Wind Southerly. My parents both died when I was in my mid 20s and never lived to see me become human; I was pretty vile until I hit 40. But all that I am now – my writing, my love of painting of landscape and of music – comes from them. I’m the same inside as when I was 8.

Playing by the book: What nature writers/artists for adults or for children do you turn to nowadays for a dose of delight, excitement or understanding?

Nicola Davies: I return time and again to J. A Baker’s The Peregrine. I don’t very often get to the end because the writing makes me stop and think and re-read. It’s one of the few things that make me want to write apart from poetry – Ted Hughes, Seamus Heany, Kathleen Jaimie, John Heath Stubbs, Vernon Scannel, Les Murray… Its a long list!

I read a lot of nonfiction. Richard Holmes is a god, and my old friend Richard Mabey always tells me something new. Simon Barnes‘ work is wonderful too – full of insight and warmth and humour. But it’s actually visual art I find most inspiring – I’m a frustrated painter inside really. Landscapes are still my great love. The little water colours of the Yorkshire landscape that David Hockney did when he first came back from LA were just ravishing, I was physically enraptured, blown away, knocked out by those.

And Peter Doing – his visionary tropical landscapes are astounding. I went to Australia when my kids were small and got exposed to aboriginal art, not just the Northern Territories figurative stuff but the Western Desert dreaming pictures, and they opened my eyes to all manner of things. My favourite artist there is Pansy Napangardi, making pictures of astounding beauty, scale and vision, with deep meaning, just sitting in the desert in a flowery frock. The day I sell film rights or win the lottery, that’s one of the first calls: to the gallery in Sydney that sells her work.

Playing by the book: It’s fascinating to hear how important art is to you, as I’m particularly interested in the role of illustration in your works – a role which is perhaps extra important given their message about the beauty of nature. Your books have been illustrated by a panoply of stellar artists – Marc Boutavant, Salvatore Rubbino, Mark Heard, Brita Granstrom, Neal Layton, Michael Foreman, and Laura Carlin to name but a few. How do you work with your illustrators? What sort of (if any) collaboration is there?

Nicola Davies: I don’t draw any more. I regret not keeping it as part of my life and getting better, but it’s kind of too late to start the process of improving now, I think. And I am now rubbish at it. But I do have a passion for images and when I finish a book I have a really strong sense of the emotional and intellectual job that I want the illustration to do.

Luckily Walker Books let me have a big say in who we use and even more luckily I’ve worked with some brilliant people. The amount of contact varies. Sometimes I never even see the illustrator, but sometimes we chat and meet. Indeed, increasingly it’s the latter. Most of the people you mentioned, especially Mark, Brita, Neal and also Emily Sutton, I worked with and met and talked to about our vision of the book. Salvatore took pictures of my old house by the river in Tiverton and made them the illustrations for Just Ducks!, so he made that book like an autobiography, which was so lovely.

But it would be wrong to say I have any influence on their work and I wouldn’t want to. Illustrators have to let the text speak to them and have their own relationship with it.

Working with Laura has been wonderful. We had very little contact while she was working on The Promise, but I saw her work in progress via the designer of the book, Liz Wood. I saw Laura’s journey, and that was a great privilege. I remember when we were deciding who should illustrate it, well, seeing Laura’s work, I knew at once she was the one

The way she defines space is extraordinary and The Promise is all about how the small scale influences the big, and Laura understands that totally. We spoke at the same conference in January this year and I have to say hearing her speak about her work was so inspiring. I always say great art, certainly the art I like, has to come from a real place, rooted in the identity, the experience, the LIFE – and Laura’s work is entirely consistent with her as a human being. She wears her wisdom and her insight so lightly and her work comes from a deep sense of personal truth and outward looking. We’ve started talking about a new book, which I’m desperate to write.

Playing by the book: That sounds incredibly exciting, Nicola – I can’t wait to hear more about this!

But returning to you as a writer – I think you’re an unusual author, comfortable across a variety of genres, from poetry, to fiction, to non-fiction. What role does narrative play for you in writing, especially in writing non-fiction and poetry? For you, what is narrative, and how is it different (and similar) in your non fiction as opposed to your fiction?

Nicola Davies: Narrative is EVERYTHING. I’m always saying this but it’s the psychological carrier bag that humans have used to pass around truths, from information on how to skin a rabbit to the deep currents in our nature.

I think there’s a perception of narrative as plot, as the stuff that happens, but it isn’t. Narrative is a shape, a structure. It might be made of character, it might be made of plot, it might be made of a single vision. But narrative creates an emotional link with the reader, a channel down which information – fictional or non fictional- can be communicated.

Wordsworth’s poem Upon Westminster Bridge is a narrative. Nothing happens, no characters beyond the voice of the narrator, but it has a shape, a beginning a middle and and end, so you remember it AND the information it contains.

I went to the Children’s Media Conference this year and heard every TV executive say the word “narrative”. I’m not sure some of them had the first idea what that was, but there was a realisation that you can have all the techno wizzery in the universe but if you haven’t got a narrative that engages your viewers’ EMOTIONS, its all a waste of time.

I get very fed up of people talking about interactive media – when books are THE MOST interactive of all: reading isn’t passive. I can’t believe books have been beaten onto the back foot when we have the best, most sustainable and most intrinsically interactive medium of all.

But to get back to what you actually asked…

Narrative is the key. It’s an information delivery system, and whether the information you deliver is five made-up murders and the chase for the killer, or the life of a polar bear, it’s the same. There just isn’t a hard line between fiction and nonfiction, and as soon as you start to draw it you’re in trouble. What’s important is knowing what’s real and what isn’t – the provenance of the information, if you like.

Only grown-ups get their Y-fronts in a tangle over this. Kids get it. For instance, in my blue whale book there’s an illustration of two kids standing on a whale’s flipper. In what world can that happen? Air?? Water??? Where? Kids get that it’s story space, and in story space, stuff that’s real and stuff that’s not is mixed up. But they also get that the stuff you tell them whilst in that story space is true.

I remember running a session at the Tate Modern once and looking at an abstract painting by Lee Krasner. A little girl said “This picture is about [not "of" you notice, but "ABOUT"] what it feels like to be a bird landing in a tree, going fast, the going slow, and landing.”

So a 9 year old was quite at home with the fact that a flat abstract canvas can tell you something about time, space, speed and emotion all at once.

Oh how I love working with children!

Playing by the book: And talking of working with children, I’ve read that you’ve even written opera libretti as part of school workshops. What role does music play in your life? Can you tell me anything about the whisperings I’ve heard about musical adaptations of some of your picture books?

Nicola Davies: Music is huge. I sing with a little band now called Pangolin, although I’ve never had the belief or patience to learn an instrument. This means oddly that I listen to rather less music these days, as I’m always listening to a song over and over to learn it. But music has always had a huge role in my life – as a comfort, as a mood altering drug. And singing most days is becoming more and more important. Songs are another wonderful and very portable form of narrative. I’d LOVE to be able to write songs.

My next picture book – the ‘King Of The Sky’, which Mark Heard will illustrate – has theatrical potential. When I read it at a conference, the very strong reaction to the story made me think, “Ooo. I’ve got something here.” So I sent it to Karine Polwart, a fabulous singer-songwriter, to ask if she’d like to collaborate, and SHE SAID “YES!” – I couldn’t believe it. So now we’re looking into theatrical help from a director friend of mine and the plan is to make it into a musical, but using mainly voice (which Karine is brilliant at) to create something that children will be able to perform and make their own.

Playing by the book: Oh, Nicola, that sounds amazing – definitely something I’d travel to see (Festivals: Are you listening?!).

Thank you so much Nicola for such a lovely conversation today. I’ve gone away with a long reading/viewing list, and I didn’t need the hankies I brought with me this time!

Nicola Davies’ website: http://www.nicola-davies.com/
Nicola Davies on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nicolakidsbooks

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Fabulously serious logo by Sarah McIntyre

I got back from my summer holiday last night. I went to CWIG, which is not an obscure Welsh village, but the Society of Authors Children's Writers' and Illustrators' Group conference. It happens every three years in different cities, and this year it was in Reading.It was called 'Joined-up Reading'. Is that 'joined-up reading' or 'joined-up Reading'? Who knows. Maybe both.


Normally, we writers and illustrators spend our days, doing what we want, bossing around people  who don't exist and skiving work to chat on Skype/Facebook/twitter about the work we should be doing. We're not used to being with other people all the time, or doing as we're told. We're not used to having to get dressed before working, eat at regular times, use a knife and fork nicely or sit quietly without telling a bunch of lies. But a conference is a proper organised thing with set mealtimes, talks to attend and other people to interact with.

So why do we go? Holiday!

CWIG is a delight. Full of old friends and potential new friends, a chance to gossip, eat, drink and whinge. If any snippet of useful information leaks in, that's a bonus.

Nicola Davies, unfazed by being elbowed by a giant ghost - all in a day's work for us

CWIG is just writers and illustrators - it's not somewhere to look for an agent or publisher. And so no one has to be impressive, there's no point in showing off, and we can all just relax. It's a time for singing silly songs and drinking the bar out of wine. (We did that on the first night; the last time I was party to drinking a bar out of wine was in Outer Mongolia in 1990 on the day the Iraq War started.)

I loved it. But like all the best holidays, it had its grumble-points. The food was poor, the bar was hopeless, the cabaret compulsory (hah! we laugh in the face of compulsory!), the coffee undrinkable (that's serious) and the microphones non-functional. The Germans took all the sun loungers and there was tar on the beach. Oh. Hang on.

But we don't get this stuff every day, unlike, say, manager-type-people who are forever going to conferences and staying in the Scunthorpe (or Dubai) BestWesternMarriotHilton hotel. Indeed, most days we don't get interaction with another human being who actually exists. To be in a whole room of around 100 people, none of whom can be given green hair or three arms on a whim, is quite a novelty. CWIG is a weekend away in the real world.

Only our invisible friends were skiving outside

But look - we can play in the real world, too.

We talked about the state of publishing (in turmoil), of what the hell the government thinks it's doing with libraries (wanton armageddonising), of the progress of e-books in children's publishing (mollusc-like in its rapidity) and whether Allan Ahlberg's glass contained red wine or Ribena (who knows?) And heard the usual disingenuous comment from a publisher that there's never been a better time to be a children's writer.



Now for my holiday snaps. Don't shuffle like that. You might like to visit the real world one day.



Here is our venue: a very plausible-looking Henley Business Centre at Reading University.









We had proper signage, just like real business people. Well, perhaps not quite like real business people.







Just in case we didn't know where to walk ...





.... and where to dance, there were some stick people drawn on the floor.

(Obviously the nice people at Reading know that all writers - and  especially illustrators - speak fluent stick.)








We know how to dress. Alan Gibbons and John Dougherty, as usual, wore shirts chosen to burn out the eyes of Ed Vaizey. I won't dazzle you with those. Sarah McIntyre chaired her session in the best conference hat I have ever seen. [What do you mean, 'what's a conference hat?']








 Allan Ahlberg brought his teddy.









And he had a drink on the stage, though his wasn't see-through, like they usually are when you see conferences on TV.










We all transacted our own little bits of networking and business. I secured a promise from Catherine Johnson to translate some text into Jamaican Fairy and asked Jane Ray if I could commission a dodo from her.





So you see, we do know how to do it.

I had a wonderful time, but holidays can't last forever and it's time to settle be back into speaking stick and bossing around a steam-powered autamaton and an orphan in a boat. Sigh.

(If you would like to read a more informative account of what happened at CWIG, you could turn to David Thorpe. I'm sure more will appear, and I'll update this list later in the day/week/millennium.) 

Anne Rooney
(Stroppy Author)

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