If you want something for young children that’s full of zing and just a little bit different on the poetry front, then Anything But A Grabooberry is exactly what you’re looking for! First published by the wonderful Tara Books in 1998, it still feels as innovative as it was then.

Anushka Ravishankar’s nonsense poem that fills the book is based on the premise that I’d rather be anything else apart from a Grabooberry… The examples that make up that “anything else” will have young readers laughing aloud, as well as letting imaginations fly with what the dreadful grabooberry might be. And Rathna Ramanathan has incorporated the words into the book’s design, creating a visual treat in red and green through her exuberant combination of the words’ meanings and physical appearance.

As you read, you find yourself having to slow down over each page to savour the design. This in turn encourages deeper pondering of the meaning – thereby intensifying the enjoyment of reading nonsense! Choosing favorite bits is difficult, but here goes:

i want to be an elephant or a packing trunk

- I love the juxtaposition of elephant and trunk, and you can see these pages on this post from a Japanese blog, which also reproduces the book’s blurb in English;

i think i’d like to be sneeze
flying through the sky

- where “sneeze” and “flying” fizz across the pages and some of the letters are spun at angles – the “i” in “flying” becoming, appropriately enough, an exclamation mark; and

the sun, the moon or sixteen stars
any planet, even ours

Anything But A Grabooberry is perfect for getting children chuckling aloud, and both they and the adults they share it with will appreciate the book’s visual wit and sophistication. Do read this article by Rathna Ramanathan for some fascinating insight into the book’s creation – I especially liked what she said about children’s feedback on early drafts, and Gita Wolf’s comments:

I tested the pages out on several friends’ kids – their reading aloud of the typographic text on the page was an invaluable input. It gave the bee many more ‘e’s, and the grabooberry more ‘ooo’s… [...] As Gita Wolf, publisher at Tara Books explains, ‘We found that children enjoy figuring out words like puzzles, since they have no pre-conceptions about this. Adults are not necessarily faster at comprehending it.’

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Tabitha Yeatts: The Opposite of Indifference – head on over…

I already had a post earmarked to share with you from the wonderful Playing by the Book, and today she has another one – so here they both are:

Firstly, this great focus on children’s books from Norway, part of Zoe’s Read Around Europe – so we can look forward to more great country round-ups.

And today this wonderful post about last year’s New Horizons winner at the Bologna Book Fair, Do! by Ramesh Hengadi, Rasika Hengadi, Shantaram Dhadpe, and Kusam Dhadpe, with Gita Wolf (Tara Books, 2010). What makes this post extra special is that Zoe and her children have created a beautiful pillowcase using Warli techniques using the video of Do! from Tara Books, included in the post. Watch, read and be inspired – yes, Do!

Gita Wolf, publisher and director at Tara Books,  has posted a wonderful entry on the Tara Books Blog entitled The Politics of Voice: Folk and Tribal Art in Children’s Literature in which she talks about her presentation at the recent IBBY Congress:

“It may seem, at first glance, that the majority is the dominant force in every society, but those who dramatically change their world, now and throughout history, always belong to the minority.”  With this motto, the International Board on Books for Young People – IBBY – organized their Congress this year in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The theme was The Strength of Minorities. Given Tara’s work with folk and tribal art communities, I was invited to contribute, to talk about how these ‘outsider’ artists could change the course of children’s literature.

The fundamental question for me had to do with how we can re-imagine children’s literature. What possibilities are there in a publishing world that is increasingly dominated by big business, bestsellers, and a certain sameness in what we think is suitable for children?

When we started publishing in 1995, there were very few picture books for children in India. Ours has been a largely oral tradition, and the notion of children’s literature came from abroad. So Indian children’s books tended to be derivative. To create something that was original, we looked around for Indian illustrators, and what excited us most was the potential we saw in traditional artists.

To read the rest of the article (which contains some lovely illustrations and images!) click here .

Note: The image above is by Gond artist Bhajju Shyam and is from the book The Flight of the Mermaid, text by Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao (Tara Books, 2009).  Bhajju is currently featured in our PaperTigers Illustrator Gallery.

We are posting this reminder on behalf of our friends at Tara Books:

Just a reminder (especially for our librarian and educator friends) that Tara Books will be in D.C. this coming weekend for the American Library Association Annual Conference, at booth #2883. Exhibit Hours are: Friday, June 25, 5:30 – 7:30 pm, Saturday-Sunday, June 26-27, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm, Monday, June 28, 9:00 am- 4:00 pm.

We’re excited to share our forthcoming titles for Fall 2010, including new artwork by renowned Gond artist Durga Bai and a graphic novel on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

For more information, please contact Tara Books’s US publicist, Jennifer Abel.

The BolognaRagazzi Awards 2010 have just been announced over on the Bologna Book Fair website. For us at PaperTigers, two books stand out immediately:

Do! by Gita Wolf, illustrated by Ramesh Hengadi & Shantaram Dhadpe (Tara Books, 2009), winner of the New Horizons Award

What the jury said:

Bursting with bright clarity, this book illustrated by Ramesh Hengadi and Shantaram Dhadpe employs an extremely refined use of colour. Paper and figures are embroidered with a lace like precision. There is a wealth of narrative in the details that beg to be explored at length. The exceptional elegance of the ochre and white colour palette together with its multi-facetted narrative potential makes this an exquisitely crafted, eminently readable book.

and The Drum Calls Softly by David Bouchard and Shelley Willier, illustrated by Jim Poitras, music by Northern Cree (Red Deer Press, 2008), Non-Fiction Mention

What the jury said:

The joyful yet complex style of Jim Poitras is the vehicle for an enjoyable lesson in cultural anthropology. The clear contours of the foreground figures dialogue effortlessly with the landscapes in the background whose colourful, complex and material quality is rendered almost tangible. This novel illustration technique is particularly suited as a book for children since it highlights to great effect how man’s customs, lifestyles and traditions take on significance only when seen against the backdrop of the skies, hills, rivers and natural world that gave rise to them.

The winning books come from all over the world and it does indeed look like an absolutely stunning selection. And this seems the perfect moment to let everyone know that Aline, Corinne and I will be at the Bologna Book Fair this year (yippee!) so we will be among the lucky ones to see all these books in one and the same place.

If you are going to be there too and would like to meet up, then do drop us a line. And if you can’t be there, keep an eye here on our blog as we will be posting regularly, to share some of our highlights with you all straightaway!

Bookaroo, India’s first ever festival of children’s literature took place November 22 and 23rd in New Delhi. Journalist Jai Arjun Singh attended the event and wrote an article about it in the Business Standard. He states:

“India’s first literature festival for children is a reminder of the expanding market in kids’ writing.

A few years ago, it would have been packed, end to end, with Enid Blytons and perhaps the occasional Dr Seuss book (frowned upon by parents because it wasn’t “meaningful enough” for young children). But now there’s an abundance of titles by Indian writers… — all of whom are present at this festival, hosting interactive sessions and workshops, and having a rollicking good time by the looks of it. And all of whom are refreshingly open-minded about the possibilities of children’s literature.

“We’ve finally outgrown the patronising idea that a good children’s book must have an obvious moral attached to it,” says Sayoni Basu, publishing director, Scholastic India, pointing out that it’s possible now for children’s writing in India to be fantastical, silly, irreverent, even dark, as long as it doesn’t get too negative. “People are realising that kids are tougher than they get credit for.”

Scholastic India alone has published around a hundred original children’s titles this year, and other publishers such as Pratham Books (which co-organised Bookaroo), Tara, and Puffin are expanding their catalogues too. Another key development, says Basu, is that the quality of illustrations has vastly improved: “a children’s book now looks like something you might actually want to pick up”.

“The idea that children don’t read nowadays is a vastly overstated one,” says [Indian children's author Sampurna] Chattarji. Going by the enthusiastic response to Bookaroo, she’s right.”

Jai Arjun Singh welcomes our readers to visit his blog where he has posted additional information about Bookaroo as well as photos of the event. Click here and here. You can also visit Pratham Books’ blog to read more Bookaroo reviews.

Continuing with our current literacy focus, and thinking towards World Literacy Day on September 8th, this is the first of three posts focusing on and beyond a session at this year’s Bologna Book Fair…

In my first post following our return from the Bologna Book Fair, I highlighted the session organised by the IFLA (International Federation of Libraries Associations and Institutions). The session was organised by the Netherlands Public Library Association and they called it “Invitation to JES: Join – Enjoy – Share”. Despite not being librarians, Aline and I were made very welcome and we really enjoyed chatting to the librarians afterwards. In fact, the various informal discussions got so lively that we were asked to keep the noise down – well, makes a change! As well as our Dutch hosts, there were children’s librarians there from all over the world: Australia, Colombia, Croatia, France, Italy, Japan, Senegal and Tanzania. The atmosphere was buzzing!

We had two speakers: the first, Patsy Aldana, the current president of IBBY, gave us a fascinating talk entitled “Books as Mirrors” in which she traced the history of multicultural book publishing in her home-country, Canada, where her own Groundwood Books has been so ground-breaking (for more on multiculturalism in Canadian publishing, see here). Her childhood in Guatemala without books to mirror her own experiences, mean that she also has a personal affinity to the world of multicultural books. It had been a very painful struggle, she said, to define the role of the writer: who could write legitimately about what? Those white people who had been the only published writers of books under the multicultural umbrella would ask, “Why can’t I write whatever I want? Who are you to tell me not to write about your experience?” and were being asked “What right do you have to steal my story – the world you’re describing is not real”.

This situation is now much resolved in Canada but there are still real concerns. “Children need books that are windows and books that are mirrors,” she said: and unfortunately there is uneven access for children to these kinds of books. What happens to children who never see themselves in the books they read; and one step further, what happens when children are not taught to read in their own language? It is an enormous disincentive to the desire to read. She pointed to the work of some “fabulous” small publishers from all over the world and urged us to visit their stands at the fair – such as Tara Books from India, Ekeré from Venezuela, and Editions Bakamé from Rwanda, (which shared this year’s IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award). Small publishers need our support because so often it is their books which give “that flash of recognition – That is me!”

Citing the example of an Iranian librarian in Sweden who is able to ensure that children of Iranian background can access books attuned to their experience and outlook, Patsy concluded by saying that librarians are the people who can be relied on to bring books to children. Librarians can insist on quality – for without quality it is hard to foster a love of reading and provide the key to the mirror/window.

I think there’s plenty to chew on there and I will post about the second speaker in Part 2!