Following on from Monday’s post, here are some of our highlights from Day 2 of the Bologna Book Fair.

We started out with a children’s theatre production inspired by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and performed by students from Bratislava’s Academy of Fine Arts – great fun!

The JES: Join – Enjoy – Share session for the International Meeting of Children’s Librarians. They had two very interesting speakers lined up: Ruba Totah from the Tamer Institute in Ramallah, Palestine, which won the 2009 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, talking about their many projects, linking to community and school libraries;

and famous Brazilian author Ana Maria Machado, winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2000, who gave a very thought-provoking paper about the lamentably small number of foreign-language books translated into English…

“African Books for Children”, a roundtable session chaired by Viviana Quiñones of the French Centre national de la littérature pour la jeunesse – La Joie par les livres with Phocas Ekouedjin of Afrilivres (Association of African Francophone Publishers) and Tainie Mundondo of Apnet (African Publishers Network), as well as publishers from Benin, Senegal, Tanzania, Cameroon, Mauritius and Rwanda. They discussed the publishing and distribution of African children’s books and profiled recent children’s books published in Africa.

A presentation of the 20-year-old journal Takam Tikou in its new online format. Takam Tikou, published by the Centre national de la littérature pour la jeunesse – La Joie par les livres, focuses on children’s books and reading in Africa, the Arab world, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. If you read French, there is a fabulous wealth of material and resources available – definitely well worth exploring.

The announcement of the Astrid Lingren Award – see Corinne’s post. It was very exciting and we really felt we had a stake in it this year, with PaperTigers being a nominating body. The visual presentation of winner Kitty Crowther’s books made me want to read all of them – and also ask myself why I’d never come across her work – well, it turns out only one of her books has been translated into English. What was it that Ana Maria Machado was saying earlier that morning?

Seeing a proof of Allen Say’s new book, The Boy in the Garden - it’s going to be another gorgeous book. Thank you for showing it to us, Christine!

And you can see more photos from Day 2 here…

During our session with the IFLA (International Federation of Libraries Associations and Institutions) in Bologna, both speakers (Patsy Aldana and Viviana Quiñones) stressed the importance of children having access to books which both reflect their experiences and open windows onto other customs and cultures. We were urged to pay a visit to the stand shared by a number of different African publishers, and there we met three very special publishers, all producing books to meet that demand.

The first two were librarians we had met at the session the day before: Antoinette F. Correa from BLD (Bibliothèque-Lecture-Développement) Éditions in Senegal and Pili Dumea of the Children’s Book Project (CBP) for Tanzania.

Antoinette, pictured right with a selection of her books, told me that she set up BLD Éditions to meet the needs of both teachers and pupils, who were crying out for access to good books in their own language. She is a well-known figure in the IFLA, and sees the continued development of libraries as crucial work: as well as publishing books, BLD helps to set up libraries and trains librarians.

Pili, pictured left, is secretary to the CBP for Tanzania, which, again, connects children with books published locally. Last year the CBP was awarded the UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize for its work promoting the love of books among children and adults. One eleven-year-old, talking about her school library, following the school’s affiliation to the CBP, said

“I have read most of the books in the school library which helped me learn about different topics through interesting stories told in our own national language, Kiswahili, which is easier to understand than English.”

The third publisher was Bakamé Éditions from Rwanda, who publish children’s books in the national language, Kinyarwanda, which is understood by all Rwandans. They also run various projects to promote reading, including their “Bibliothèque en route” – a rucksack library, which takes books out to children who do not have access to an actual library. It gets a tiny mention on their English pages, but if you read French, there’s more here. Editions Bakamé was the joint recipient of this year’s IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award and this article on IBBY’s website is also an interesting read.

The work these organisations are doing is truly awe-inspiring and it was a real privilege to meet Antoinette and Pili.

Last week, I talked about Patricia Aldana’s address to the International Meeting of Children’s Librarians in Bologna. Our second speaker on that occasion was Viviana Quiñones, who spoke to us about the French national children’s book organisation La Joie par les Livres. After running through its history, she told us about some of their initiatives in promoting children’s books, such as travelling exhibitions of African books and books about the Arab world, the Caribbean and around the Indian Ocean. They also publish two magazines: “La Revue des livres pour enfants” and “Takam Tikou”, which focuses on multicultural books in French.

Of particular interest was what Viviana had to say about their work with libraries and independent publishers in Africa. Like Patricia Aldana, she stressed how important it is for children in Africa to find their own experiences mirrored in the books they read: and to read books that are reasonably up to date and written in their own language. In 1985, internationally renowned librarian Geneviève Patte visited Mali, where she found that most of the library books were inadequate… In 1987 she set up a service within La Joie par les Livres to collaborate with libraries and the publishers of African children’s books to promote locally published books. La Joie par les Livres also trains librarians, which contributes to raising the status of the libraries in the eyes of local communities.

Viviana said that there are still challenges, for example, with the distribution of books, but that in the world of African publishing, there are some inspirational stories. Afterwards, a book was recommended to me called Courage and Consequence: Women Publishing in Africa edited by Mary Jay and Susan Kelly and published by the African Books Collective. In fact, I had been sitting right next to Pili Dumea from Tanzania and across the room from Antoinette Correa from Senegal – both librarians turned publisher, whom I’ll be talking about in Part 3…