At age 83, children’s book writer and illustrator, Maurice Sendak has died.  Here’s a link to the New York Times obituary.   PaperTigers recently covered a curatorial project Sendak undertook for the Jewish museum on Hanukkah lamps in this post.   Do check it out.  And if you have half the chance, do check out the author’s many wonderful books for children.  I certainly will be heading to the library in the very near future to do just that!  What was your favorite Sendak title?  Which ones did you enjoy reading as a kid?  And which ones do you enjoy reading to your children today?

The Jewish Museum (New York, NY, USA) has unveiled a new exhibit entitled An Artist Remembers: Hanukkah Lamps Selected by Maurice Sendak. Award winning children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak is best known for his book Where the Wild Things Are which brought him international acclaim and was awarded the prestigious Caldecott Medal in 1964. He was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York  to Polish Jewish immigrants and most his extended family was killed in the Holocaust. When asked by the The Jewish Museum to “rummage through its collection and choose menorahs for a Hanukkah exhibit”  Sendak said he selected menorahs, all from the 18th to the 20th centuries, because their simplicity evoked the Holocaust.

Sendak’s work  is characterized by a push and pull between beauty and sorrow, light and darkness. His art is triggered by memories and is also their repository. The world he creates is both dangerous and healing, as he tries to deal with the trauma of the Holocaust, in which many members of his family perished.

When going through the museum’s collection, the sheer number and variety of lamps struck a nerve, underscoring Sendak’s deep, lifelong sense of loss at the destruction of the prewar world of his Eastern European Jewish parents. Having movingly evoked that world in his drawings for Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966) (image on right) and In Grandpa’s House (1985), he surprised himself by mostly avoiding its rich visual language when choosing lamps for this presentation. “I stayed away from everything elaborate. I kept looking for very plain, square ones, very severe looking,” he explained. “Their very simplicity reminded me of the Holocaust. And I thought it was inappropriate for me to be thinking of elaboration.”

The lamps Sendak finds most compelling and poignant are those that “go right to the heart,” whose “beauty is contained.” Yet his sense of humor is never far from the surface: as he made his choices he often free-associated, whimsically recalling old movies and Catskills family vacations. Above all, he is guided by his sensibility as an artist and author. He is drawn to simplicity of line, to a design “subservient to the basic idea of the piece,” and responds to the depth of emotion that emanates from a work itself or from the stories behind it. Concerned lest the past be forgotten, he hopes that young visitors to this exhibition will keep alive the memory of a vanished world.

The exhibition will take place until January 29, 2012 (more details can be found here) and the image gallery can be seen here.

Here’s the Press Release!

184 candidates from 66 countries are nominated for the world’s largest award for children’s and young adult literature. This was revealed today at the Frankfurt Book Fair by Larry Lempert, Chairman of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award jury. The figures show a distinct increase compared to last year.

– It’s very gratifying that the number of nominated candidates and countries represented continue to increase, says Larry Lempert. The jury is full of enthusiasm for the exciting and difficult task to consider the work of so many qualified candidates.

Among the nominees are 38 per cent authors, 21 per cent illustrators, 20 per cent promoters of reading and organisations, and one per cent oral storytellers. 20 per cent of the candidates are nominated in more than one category. Among the candidates are 81 men, 74 women and 29 organisations and projects dedicated to promotion of reading.

The nomination list has eight new countries represented compared to last year: Cyprus, Ecuador, Eritrea, Greenland, Moldova, Mongolia, Tanzania and Zambia.

A complete list of nominees is published on www.alma.se/en. The recipient or recipients of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award 2012 will be announced on March 20^th 1:00 p.m. CET in Vimmerby, the birthplace of Astrid Lindgren, and online at www.alma.se/en. In 2012 the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award will be presented for the 10^th time.

In 2011 the Australian illustrator and author Shaun Tan was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. The previous laureates are: Kitty Crowther (2010), Tamer Institute (2009), Sonya Hartnett (2008), Banco del Libro (2007), Katherine Paterson (2006), Philip Pullman (2005), Ryôji Arai (2005), Lygia Bojunga (2004), Christine Nöstlinger (2003) and Maurice Sendak (2003).

All of us talk to our babies, from the first minute that we are together, even though those sounds are incomprehensible to an infant’s ear. Babies soon learn to associate those sounds with comfort, warmth and attention, and begin to respond with amazing speed. Reading to a baby does exactly the same thing, and babies whose parents read to them rapidly associate books with love and closeness. They become bibliophiles long before they can walk, with favorite books firmly established by the time they celebrate their first birthdays.

Parents can find this to be a mixed blessing. My mother, who is well over eighty, can still recite every word of a Little Golden Book called The New Baby and I myself have Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are firmly implanted in my memory. After being handed the same book for thirty nights in a row, even the most literate parent begins to dread the request, “Read this story, please.”

This is where “Books at Bedtime” comes in. Marjorie Coughlan, associate editor of PaperTigers and a passionate advocate of reading aloud to children, has long been offering suggestions for bedtime audiences of all ages, and she’s looking for comments from you. Which books do your children love? Which ones make them look for something else to do instead? Is there a particular illustrator that they can’t get enough of? Does one of Marjorie’s recommendations remind you of another book on a similar subject? Join her in her book group for parents, teachers, and caregivers who share the pleasure of reading aloud to children, and who are looking for the very best books for any time of day—including, of course, bedtime.