Throughout the week of 21 June, we will be celebrating Pop Up Projects’ tenth anniversary and will be welcoming different authors and illustrators from their 10 Stories to Make a Difference books to the blog.  To introduce this special week, we are delighted to welcome Dylan Calder, founder of Pop Up.

Children’s literature organisations like Pop Up Projects, the nonprofit I founded ten years ago, occupy a vital, often unacknowledged position in the literature and publishing ecosystem. If traditional publishing represents that moment when the author ‘takes the stage’, it’s a fair chance that somewhere along their journey organisations like ours will play a crucial role: organising their workshops in classrooms, getting their books into school libraries, programming them in festivals, bringing their books to life in museums and galleries, showcasing them on digital platforms – and more. If they’re authors of colour and other marginalised backgrounds, they’ll have learned first-hand that ‘diversity’ drives everything we do; that it’s not just about children seeing and being seen, it’s about social justice and the part we have to play in championing equality and challenging hate.

Without the literature sector reaching readers in the places the big festivals never go, and investing in authors’ livelihoods in an age of dwindling advances, there would be fewer authors, fewer from non-white and lower income backgrounds, and more teachers relying on Roald Dahl and Harry Potter because that’s all they know. What’s remarkable though is that given all this literature we create and co-create, platform and champion, we don’t make and sell books ourselves. Initially, I didn’t see 10 Stories to Make a Difference as a commercial opportunity; it was a Birthday Project, really: we’d commission and produce a super small print run of ten short stories and poems, written and illustrated by some of our old friends and new, to celebrate turning ten in 2021, while introducing some debut writers and illustrators into the world.

And then the stories came in. Stories that needed an audience, that could really make a difference to children’s lives, providing some of those windows and mirrors we’re always talking about. 

Having invited six well-known writers to contribute stories on the theme of difference, exploring it from any angle and working within any form, it quickly became clear that here was an opportunity to publish stories that had not or might not find a home with other publishers: Jamila Gavin’s In Her Element, a long-nurtured tale of a non-verbal girl with quadriplegia who day dreams of a world without gravity under the sea, could not find a publisher prepared to put a character with disabilities front and centre; Sita Brahmachari’s lyrical free-verse story, Swallow’s Kiss, in which a little girl follows a trail of paper birds to the refugee community who made them, was turned down by several publishers; Philip Ardagh, one of our funniest authors, played against type in giving us Mistaken for a Bear, a historical tragedy set on the grimy streets of London where there’s a tiger on the loose; Marcus Sedgwick channelled the spirit of crisis that coursed through 2020 in Together We Win, in which an ethereal eyewitness muses on those brave human moments that kickstart revolutions; Laura Dockrill offered a deceptively simple poem about feeling out of place, championing the oddness inside us, the things that make us weird - the joyfully titled Magnificent!

Through an international competition for writers under 26 we discovered four incredible new voices: Eleanor Cullen, a recent creative writing graduate whose A Match for a Mermaid riffs on the traditional princess-seeks-suitor tale with a grand finale same-sex wedding; Anjali Tiwari, just 17 and living in Lucknow, India, gave us Forbidden, about a passionate friendship forged despite the caste system; Krista Lambert, a Texas-based LGBTQ+ ally wrote Indigo Takes Flight, a heart-breaking rhyming poem about coming out and finding acceptance from those you love; and Avital Balwit, whose short story That Thing about a sentient octopus has as much to say about how we misunderstand animals as it does about how we misrepresent humans. Our 10th writer, Jay Hulme, not new to children’s publishing, gifted us a mini-epic poem about a dragon who doesn’t belong: in his words, “a massive trans allegory” that has much to say to all of us about what it’s like to grow up feeling different - and to be perceived as a monster.

But none of these stories would be the stories they are without the illustrations that bring them so stunningly to life. Some of our greatest illustrators can be found in these books: Chris Riddell’s symbiotic dragon representing a boy struggling with his sexuality in Indigo Takes Flight; Jane Ray’s magically bright birds dancing across the pages of Swallow’s Kiss; David Roberts’ gloriously queer world-building in A Match for a Mermaid; the dazzling octopi amidst the watercolour washes by Alexis Deacon in That Thing.

10 Stories also helps launch some of the brightest new stars into the world of children’s books: Jamie Beard’s background in LGBTQ+ community illustration brings colour to the darkness of Victorian London in Mistaken for a Bear; Danica Da Silva Pereira’s three-colour illustrations with a silk-screen feel enrich Forbidden; Ria Dastidar’s collaged papercut work for Magnificent! will have children everywhere mimicking her style; Sahar Haghgoo’s extravagant spreads for Here Be Monsters were inspired by Iranian miniatures; Daniel Ido’s arresting images of resistance and revolution light up Together We Win; and with In Her Element, Jacinta Read’s depictions of a character with disabilities see her moving beyond the confines of her wheelchair, through daydream and drama, giving her a movement many others might not have.

I’ve long held a dream of a first-timers press - a route into publishing for the unpublished, taking the risks that commercial publishers sometimes can’t, with the aim of helping children navigate that inner world that’s growing and changing, while making sense of the outer world which can be as cruel and bleak as it can be warm and bright. I hope that our 10 Stories does just that.