YLR Archive Index
Issue 30: Spring 2001
 Interview
by Julia Eccleshare
Quentin Blake: Children’s Laureate
Like many others, Quentin Blake was wary when the idea of a Children’s
Laureate was first proposed.
“There were various problems with the idea: the process was obviously
contentious and I was thoroughly against a shortlist but, beyond that,
there was also the problem that it seemed as if it would take two people
to do it; one who was about 35 who could be a roving ambassador, travelling
the country and the other who was more experienced who could give a
lecture or what have you.”
And that was before he even knew he was on the very long long-list
or the short-list, let alone that he was to be the first Children’s
Laureate. Now, almost at the end of the two-year appointment, Quentin
has certainly completely changed what he thinks about the Laureate and,
through his interpretation of this unique role, he has changed everyone
else’s perceptions, too.
Currently, the National Gallery is swarming with children: over 2,000
visitors a day are pouring into the Sunley Gallery and the schools visits
are fully booked until the exhibition closes in June. Why? They’ve
come to see Tell Me a Picture, Quentin Blake’s A-Z exhibition
which puts Foreman next to Goya in a non-hierarchical hanging designed
to encourage people, and children especially, to tell their own stories
about the pictures and make up their own minds about what they enjoy.
Through the exhibition, Quentin has achieved one of the purposes of
Laureate: to take children’s books into new places and to new
audiences. “I suggested the idea to the National Gallery and the
advantage of being the Laureate was that it could be an ‘official’
approach. I’m not sure it would have been taken up without that.”
For Quentin himself it is also the perfect expression of what he felt
he could do in his time as Laureate. “There was initially something
very daunting about the thought of being told what I had to do but as
soon as I found I could say no it all became far more attractive.”
By the time of his appointment, Quentin was clear that nothing had been
specifically prescribed. He had already rejected the idea of the roving
ambassador for the twin reasons that it would be too tiring and that
it would spread the communication too thinly.
Instead, he worked out his own programme and rationalisation for the
Laureate. One of the things he was most anxious to avoid was the pitfall
of the Children’s Laureate just compounding the notion of a children’s
book ghetto in which the emphasis is on being for children rather than
on being writers and artists. “The important thing that I thought
I ought to be doing was talking to adults. I wanted to raise the level
of discussion with adults to show that the range of skills in illustrating
and writing for children are the same as they are in other creative
areas: to show that it is something that is thought about and organised
and that it has a structure.”
To this end, Quentin has given a talk almost every month to a wide
range of audiences, mostly adults but also family groups as at the Edinburgh
Festival, including two major lectures on quite different aspects of
illustration which demonstrate just how carefully he had planned what
he would say during the two years. In the Patrick Hardy lecture in 1999,
a talk without slides, he described in words alone the way in which
descriptive writing could – and could not – be illustrated
taking his examples from literature. In contrast, his talk at the IBBY
conference in 2000 demonstrated graphically that the history of children’s
book illustration is not the history of children’s books since
illustrators draw from all sorts of other sources. In his own case,
these are the work of Rowlinson, Cruickshank and Caldecott, for example,
all of whom “draw things that are urgently happening”.
But though Quentin saw talking to adults as the prime purpose of being
the Laureate, he never ignored children. In France, where he already
has a large and devoted following and where he does more school visits
because “it is more exotic and different for me”, he made
a book which started with a group of children in Charente and then extended
to a vast network of over 1800 children adding their input through the
net.
Briefed to create something with sound humanitarian principles, Quentin
responded to the children’s suggestions, drawing roughs of their
ideas as well as adding his own. The result is a book to be published
first in France and then, when Quentin has had the time to translate
it, in England.
Other books, too, have come out of Quentin’s time as Laureate.
He has worked tirelessly as the Laureate which has meant putting his
own picture books largely on hold. Instead he has produced three very
different books:
The Laureate’s Party, an informative guide to Quentin’s
50 favourite books; Words and Pictures, a round up of his own working
life which he’d had planned for some time but which was given
a raison d’etre by the Laureate, and Tell Me a Picture, the book
which goes with the exhibition but which works as well on its own, fulfilling
the same purpose of encouraging first looking at the pictures which
stand alone on a double-page spread and then adding some of the kind
of questions a teacher would ask children to think about. “They
are all books that come directly from being the Laureate, although Words
and Pictures would have happened in the end without. As it happened,
being the Laureate came at a very good time for me. I’d retired
from teaching twelve years before and, in those years, I’d done
a lot of illustration. I was doing too much. I had too many books overlapping
one another and it was rather overwhelming. It was greed really: I couldn’t
resist the next book.”
On the other hand, Quentin is not sure he would have been able to do
the job had it been offered to him much later in his career. “It’s
very demanding and I’m not sure I would have had the energy,”
he says. For two years Quentin has been the public face of children’s
books on radio, TV, in countless interviews and now as mastermind behind
a National Gallery exhibition. Three more exhibitions are in hand: one
opening in March in Bury St Edmunds; The Magic Pencil, a travelling
exhibition for the British Council, and something for later at the Tate.
The idea of a children’s Laureate has been realised. Through
Quentin’s work it is now established and credible, with a real
role to play in informing the world of the quality and importance of
children’s books.
Julia Eccleshare is a critic and broadcaster and is
currently the children’s books editor of The Guardian. She has
been chair of the Smarties prize for the past €ve years, and has been
a judge for the Branford Boase Award and the Mother Goose Award as well
as the Guardian Children’s Book Award. She is on the advisory
board of Reading is Fundamental. She is the winner of the Eleanor Farjeon
Award, 2000. She is also an excellent speaker and has spoken at YLG
Conferences and regional training days on a range of children’s
book related issues.
She can be contacted on: 0207 431 1295 or email: julia@jhammond.free-online.co.uk
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