Welcome, Picturebook Writers and Illustrators!

I will start with 3 posts on biographical picturebooks as part of my Children’s Literature course at Roehampton University. I hope you will join in with your own reflections, book suggestions and creative work!

I know this sounds nonsensical, but the house felt empty. I found some portraits and cabinets. A death mask. Some informative panels. 

But not my John Keats!

Sometimes, I think, this can happen with children’s biographical reference books. With all their photos, timelines, glossaries and maps they can actually miss the essence, the point of it all: the person. 

This is where the biographical picturebook comes in: a highly flexible, polisystemic literary form, which combines historical accuracy to engage and inform, with narrative cohesion to move and delight.   

The three picturebooks we will be exploring together (Barb Rosenstock and Mary Granpre’s The Noisy Paint Box: The Colours and Sounds of Kandinsky’s Abstract Art, Pam Muñoz Ryan and Brian Selznick’s When Marian Sang: The True Recital of Marian Anderson, and Chis Hadfield and the Fan Brothers’ The Darkest Dark) have been selected from a long list of alliteration loving, time-line flapping creative history books. They all present an extended narrative section, the text proper, and a wealth of paratextual elements, which substantiate, complement and, sometimes, alter our reading of the text. 

I chose them to investigate the following questions: why the picturebook? Why adopt this literary form to write about history and biography for children? How can it be harnessed to deliver the richness of human experience in only 8 sheets of printed, folded and bundled paper?

I hope you will join in with your own reflections, questions and suggestions.