For the grand finale of Pop Up’s blog takeover, we are proud to present, not one but two brilliant creators… poet Jay Hulme and illustrator Sahar Haghgoo, the author and illustrator of Here Be Monsters. They are both enjoying a career first step: Here Be Monsters is Sahar’s publishing debut and Jay’s first illustrated book for children. Sahar is a participant in Pathways into Children’s Publishing, Pop Up’s mentoring and training programme in partnership with the House of Illustration (founded by Quentin Blake) and 12 global publishers, which supports artists from under-represented groups into careers in children’s books.

Jay asks Sahar

J: How did you decide on the dragon's shape?

S: I focused on its scale and grandeur, and also on its kindness. The image of the main character and the whole atmosphere of the story needed to reflect the epic nature of the text, so the dragon needed to take up a lot of space. I usually study a lot of pictures for character designs and I am particularly interested in Iranian miniatures.  

J: Do you have a favourite form of writing to illustrate? Poetry? Novels? Short stories? Picture books? Something else?

S: I’ve spent most time on picture books and short stories in my projects on the Pathways into Children’s Publishing programme, and I’m excited that my first published children’s book is a picture book – and also a poem.

J: What's your favourite colour?

S: My favourite colours are red and purple, and you’ll find them both in the underwater world of Here Be Monsters, but I am more interested in how colours work together.

J: What's your favourite illustration technique? (watercolour, digital, collage, etc).

S: I like collage very much, but most of the work I have done so far has been digital, which of course I drew with a pencil before.

J. How do you hope Here be Monsters will make a difference?

S. That people will realise that creatures who are different and might seem scary, because we don’t see all of them, are a beautiful addition to our world.

Sahar asks Jay

S: Will you write more stories with dragons as the main character?

J: Absolutely I will. I love dragons, they're my all-time favourite mythical creature. I've already got a number of poems and poem drafts with dragons in them, just lying around waiting to find a home!

S: What is your favourite colour?

J: I really like muted colours and earth tones: navy blue, burgundy, dark forest green, greys, browns, that kind of thing. I'm not a hugely colourful person to be honest, I think I'd have done well in the days before synthetic dyes gave us an inconceivable number of bright colours to work with.

S: Do you prefer to write for children or adults?

J: Writing for children and for adults is very different. The way you approach what you're sharing has to change to take that into account, but I always make my work very layered. Here Be Monsters is, on the surface, a simple story of about a creature who lives in the sea and then grows wings and lives in the air. But when you dive deeper, it  is an allegory for something else entirely. It’s about metamorphosis and about feeling that the way you have been living is not how you want to be for your whole life. The creature’s “songs of loss and fear and shame” are what is felt by people who are not able to live in their true identity.

I think writing for children is simultaneously easier and harder, because I can indulge myself and fill the story with dragons and joy and big sweeping ideas without having to reign in the hope for the cynicism and pain of an adult audience, but I'm also constantly aware of the fact that children's books shape children. The books you read as a child help to guide what kind of adult you will become, and what ideas you carry with you into adulthood. Children's books are part of the foundation of a person, and that's an enormous responsibility that I take very seriously. So there's a fair bit of pressure there. 

S: Here Be Monsters is a parable about the transgender experience. How do you hope your book will help make a difference to the way children think about or react to the experience you have been through?

J. I think the power of a parable, an allegory, is that it creates in its subject matter a wider applicability - yes, this story is about being trans, and the details all line up for that experience, but because it's told through the medium of a dragon, lots of children will be able to relate it to their own lives and struggles, and this will lead to increased empathy. When a trans child reads it, they will hopefully feel seen and validated, and when a cis child reads it, they will hopefully feel a connection to that character and experience too, a connection that will enable them to see their trans peers in a positive light.

We would like to offer enormous thanks to Pop Up for the innovative 10 Stories to Make a Difference project, to Jay and Sahar for an amazing joint interview - the perfect way to round off the week's celebrations! - and to Nicky Potter for her unparallleled support in bring this takeover to fruition!

We are hugely excited to welcome Marcus Sedgwick to the blog for day three of our Pop UpTakeover to mark the publication of their special 10^th anniversary  10 Stories to Make a Difference books.  Marcus’s first published novel was Floodland which was awarded the Branford Boase Award.  His novel My Swordhand is Singing was awarded the BookTrust Teenage Prize and he was awarded the Michael L Prinz for Midwinterblood.  Here Marcus introduces some of the ideas that helped inspire Together We Win, his story for Pop Up which has been illustrated by Daniel Ido an exciting new illustrating talent whose influences include Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon, J R R Tolkein and Roald Dahl.

Just once, I gave a talk about conscientious objectors, specifically the conscientious objectors of the First World War. I was speaking in a large hall to around 400 year 8/9 students, from three different schools, and I could see I had my work cut out – there are very few people who believe that all violence is wrong; most of us believe that sometimes you have to fight, even some of the gentlest people would concede that maybe in extreme circumstances, war might be necessary, for example. And my talk was about a group of around 30 men who had refused to do anything that furthered the war effort – while many COs went to the front lines and worked in the Royal Army Medical Corp, for example – the ‘absolutists’ I was speaking about refused any involvement, on the grounds that if they did anything to help the war, they may as well be killing German soldiers themselves.

What interests me about these men is the strength of such an apparently extreme belief. What internal power do you have to hold in the face of near overwhelming opposition to your view, to hold onto it? To hold onto it, I might add, despite not just moral censure or even a jail sentence – these 34 absolutists stuck to their view even when their death sentences were announced.

But, I said to the hall full of students, let’s look at this issue another way. Let’s try an experiment.

Is there anyone here, I asked, who thinks that women should not be able to vote? Put your hand up if so. There was a slight edginess in the room, a stirring. A where-is-he-going-with-this, perhaps. I don’t know, but no one put their hand up.

Fine. So put your hand up, if you think that black people should not have the same rights as white people. That they should be slaves to white people. Another slight edgy pause. People looked around the room, but no one put their hand up.

Okay, so put your hand up if you think women should not be allowed to do the same jobs as men. No hands.

Or, if you think Britain should rule India or various countries in Africa, please put your hand up. Still, no hands. Not one, in a room of a few hundred people.

Yet all these views, and many similar ones besides, were once commonly accepted as correct, and by the overwhelming majority of people in Britain. Now, the vast mass of people knows that such views are abhorrent, and even if there were some young people in the room with racist or sexist leanings, their knowledge that such views are no longer acceptable in itself made them keep silent – they know that most people believe them to be holding abhorrent views.

So what changed? What changed between slavery, oppression of women’s voting and employment rights and so on ­– and emancipation from these things? What changed was that a tiny, minority opinion fought to make its voice heard. It made its voice heard and it stuck to it opinion in spite of all and any objection from the masses. Throughout history, ALL change has come from the unorthodox. This is true by definition – a paradigm cane only be overturned by a revolutionary viewpoint.

So this is why I wrote Together We Win, to show that sometimes, a small number of people, sometimes even one person, can start the fire that leads to lasting change – they light the fire of awareness, that illuminates the path from oppression to liberation. Right now, we are at many tipping points, there is still a very long way to go in the various journeys for equality, but we should never feel alone, we should never feel that our voice doesn’t count. Every voice counts, and at a tipping point, it only takes one.

Those 34 absolutists were taken from medieval prison conditions in Essex, in a sealed train, to France, where, under martial law, they had the death sentence passed against them. They were given one more chance to recant – they didn’t. They said they would rather be shot by the firing squad. At the very last moment, the sentences were revoked, and they were sent to a penal prison camp on Dartmoor, where many died of disease, malnutrition, or beatings by the guards. Years later, one or two of them were interviewed by the Imperial War Museum; the frail voices of now old men captured on tape, allowing us a window into the mind of someone with the strongest conviction imaginable.

Why did you do what you did? asks the interviewer at one point. The answer? It was just something you felt you had to do. You knew it was right.  

A big thank you to Marcus Sedgwick for the blog, to Pop Up for its innovative 10 Books to Make a Difference and to Nicky Potter for her work in securing these blogs.

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.

Eva Eland grew up in Delft, Netherlands. She studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York as well as at the Cambridge School of Art, where she received a distinction in children’s book illustration. Eva won the 2020 Klaus Flugge Prize with When Sadness Comes to Call, which also won a V&A award, book cover category.  Where Happiness Begins was published in 2020.

With such a broad range of illustrations and all the different approaches to storytelling in the longlist of this year’s Klaus Flugge Prize - the prize for the most exciting newcomer in picture books - it has been very inspiring for me to delve into and analyse the books. The shortlist contains five very distinctive books, that feel fresh, original and demonstrate a high standard of work. Parents, children and book lovers in general are lucky with all the new picture books they can choose from these days.

The fact that the books and illustrations are very different from each other in how they look and what they accomplish, reminds me of just how many functions a book can have. Picture books can be these beautiful and rich objects we can share with each other, talk about, enjoy and be comforted by. They can invite us to reflect on our life, our relationships and put our feelings into words and images, giving us the vocabulary we might need to deal with some of the more complicated issues in life. They can offer an escape and stir our imagination, make us wonder and test our own understanding of the world and our preconceived ideas. Some might even encourage us to be brave, as they remind us of the things that truly matter and that we can always return home.

Illustration, and especially the space between text and image and how they relate to each other, has such a vital importance to bring all these elements out in a book. It can build worlds for the words to live in. For children, a picture book can be their first encounter with art and art, in turn, I think, can help stimulate an appreciation for the beauty that can be found all around us. An appreciation that will enrich our lives and help to cultivate a sense of childlike wonder.

To have a prize that is focused on illustration alone, and that encourages new talent by celebrating their work and giving them more visibility, is hugely important in a time where so many new books get published every year, and new makers might otherwise get lost.

The longlist for the Klaus Flugge Prize is well worth perusing, as each of the books has their own story to tell and there are some exceptional and original new voices in illustration that I’m sure we will see more of in the future.

From these books, five of them stood out in particular, and make up this year's shortlist.

My Red Hat by Rachel Stubbs is a tender tale, full of love, showing the relationship between a grandfather and child. They share stories, adventures and dreams together and we get a sense of all the things that a grandparent might want to pass down to their grandchild, and the encouragement they can offer to go and discover the world on their own. This story unfolds in a very organic way and at a gentle pace, from spread to spread, with the red hat as a visual and thematic thread holding the words and images together. The unusual landscape format and the hand drawn typography fit the story and the illustrations perfectly.

Rachel Stubbs cleverly depicts childhood, with all its ups and downs, and the moments when you might get lost but are found again and return home, ‘to where you belong’. The looseness of the marks and the delicate lines add to the gentle and imaginative atmosphere and the limited colour palette gives it that extra nostalgic flavour, cherishing the innocence of childhood and the special bond that can exist between child and grandparent.

A book that stands out for its very original approach to the illustrations is While You’re Sleeping, illustrated by John Broadley and written by Mick Jackson. The book takes us through a night and its creatures, workers and wanderers. With its absence of a story arch or protagonist, there is a consistency and rhythm to the words and images that could work like the perfect bedtime lullaby.

The bold lines, limited colour palette and collage of patterns are reminiscent of the great English print-makers of the thirties and forties like Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, yet it feels utterly unique and there is an otherworldly quality to the artwork, with its wonky perspectives and stiff characters, adding a layer of mystery to this whole different world that seems to emerge at night.

The way the light is depicted in this book caught my eye - for the dark nighttime spreads we see beams of yellow light, with the indoor spaces like the hospital using the white of the page to indicate brightly lit spaces. Time passes slowly in this busy night, with clever transitions from the left hand to the right hand page, some compositions framed by walls and lamp posts, and other spreads bleeding off the borders creating a sense of vastness and timelessness. Though this book doesn’t tell a conventional story, it leaves you with a lot of threads of little narratives and a diverse range of characters you could make your own stories for. The illustrations are so rich with detail, that you will have plenty of room to meander through this book, and its night, and wonder about all the different lives that people are living simultaneously, and maybe in doing so, one might slowly drift away to sleep.

I was immediately drawn to the painterly and colourful illustrations by Charlotte Ager for Child of Galaxies, written by Blake Nuto. I was already familiar with her work, and it was interesting to see how she managed to bring her world and visual vocabulary to this text, and give a lot of abstract and big ideas a sense of place to simmer, allowing them to expand their meaning further. The fluid quality of the textures, marks and sketchy pencil lines, combined with a changing colour palette that help shift moods and meaning, fit the poetic text perfectly. Sometimes the words are paired with bold compositions, using what looks like collage with painted paper, or using the very spacious white of the paper itself, creating a lot of room for interpretation. Other times the text is accompanied by a more sensitive and emotive image, with shades of a limited colour palette and directional painted marks, or, for example, looming tree figures that frame a child. Scale, colours, textures and mark making are used to great effect by Charlotte Ager. The meditation on nature and the beauty all around in the illustrations, even when ‘shadows persist’, will offer the reader a lot of opportunities to reflect on the abstract ideas the text offers.The diverse range of characters makes this book feel inclusive and directed to all of us, just like the text reminds us we’re all made ‘from the stuff of the stars’.

Gustavo, the Shy Ghost is a classic story in its essence, about a shy little ghost wanting to make friends, who overcomes his own fear and reaches out. A story that will be relatable and comforting for those who experience similar shyness and insecurities (though I bet at times we all have a little bit of Gustavo in us and will recognise the universal fear of not being seen and invited to play). It’s hard not to like this character or not identify with the moments of longing and hesitation (oh, just imagine the anguish of missing a good opportunity like getting ‘eye-scream’ because you were too shy! Or wanting to get close to the girl you love but not knowing how to make yourself noticed).

This book is filled with details, textures, references and full of the strangest, yet adorable, creatures, that reappear throughout the book, with a lot to discover on each spread, making this book a joy to read and I imagine one to read again and again, reminding little ones that they are not alone.

The structure of the story and the pairing of text and image are very well crafted, there is not a word too much, and though the images are full of details to be enjoyed, it never feels cluttered or distracting, which is a remarkable feat. There is a strong sense of place, grounded in warm and muted colours, with Mexican influences and many references to The Day of the Dead, classic horror films and monsters. The palette of muted colours contrasted with warm orange and Mexican pink, and clever use of negative space as well, are integral to the storytelling and add to the sense of drama, and calm, where needed. Everything in this book, from cover to the final end papers, appears to be very considered, yet there is a light and playful touch that feels very generous and authentic, and Flavia Z Drago, not unlike Gustavo playing the violin, seems to reach out to us, the reader, by sharing her passion for illustration, storytelling and monsters, uncovering some of our deepest fears and longings with this very universal story.

I’m Sticking with You, illustrated by Steve Small and written by Smriti Halls is a character driven story, exploring friendship and the push and pull we can sometimes experience within relationships, especially with those people that are so very different to ourselves.

Bear and squirrel are very loveable characters, and Steve Small has allowed himself to zoom in on them, using only minimal background elements and props to nudge the story along, on otherwise crisp, white pages. The disparity between text and image is where the story is told and where the deadpan humour lays. The timing, scale and body language of the characters are always spot on, adding to the comedy and betraying Steve Small’s background in animation. There is a lovely twist in the book, emphasised by using a black background, and a change of direction to where the characters are going. Here we finally get to see and read the perspective of squirrel, who, after announcing he needs more space, actually misses his overBEARing friend a lot. An almost empty page shows his sudden understanding, and creates a very effective pause before he rushes back and we near the end of this story.

Looking at all these shortlisted books and seeing the different ways in which they excel and exemplify what illustration can do, reassures me that there are so many ways to tell a story, and so many stories to tell still. But also just how important it is to cultivate your own, unique (visual) storytelling voice as a picture book maker. The essence of the stories might not be new in any way - but the ways they are told feel original and personal, and give the reader the possibility to connect with the story, ideas and characters. I can’t wait to see what Steve Small, Flavia Z Drago, Charlotte Ager, John Broadly and Rachel Stubbs have in store for us in the future.

Find out more about the Klaus Flugge Prize on the website.

Do check out the picture gallery below showing:
Cover illustration and spreads for My Red Hat
Cover illustration and spreads for While You Are Sleeping
Cover illustration and spreads for Gustavo the Ghost
Cover illustration and spreads for I'm Sticking with You
Photograph of Eva Eland, copyright Signefotar

A big thank you to Eva Eland for a fantastic blog overview and to the Klaus Flugge Prize for the opportunity.

We are delighted to welcome Rachel Ip, author of The Last Garden to the blog to talk about the horticultural inspirations behind the book.

I wrote The Last Garden after reading about real gardens made in wartime and conflict. By their very nature, these gardens are not always documented or recorded, and I hope The Last Garden can shine a light on the incredible true stories behind them.

The Last Garden follows the story of a little girl who tends the last garden in a war-torn city. As the city breaks, everyone is forced to leave and soon the girl must leave her beautiful garden behind. Though the garden is empty and alone, its seeds scatter throughout the city and roots begin to take hold.

Slowly, as people return, the city begins to bloom again, and the girl comes home to her garden.

The research

War gardens (or conflict gardens as they’re sometimes called) have existed all over the world, some created by individuals, some bringing whole communities together. Initially inspired by news articles about gardens in Syria, I started researching historical and contemporary conflict gardens.

I contacted the Imperial War Museum and spoke to their photography archivists. I searched their online catalogues for historical photos and trawled written records of photos that were yet to be digitised. I also contacted the Royal Horticultural Society, and searched their incredible photography archive in London. 

I found gardens on rooftops and windowsills, in school grounds and in bomb craters. From camp and prison gardens in Singapore to peacebuilding gardens in Sudan, from the gardens in Polish and Lithuanian ghettos of WWII to victory gardens across the UK, US and Canada, these gardens each have their own unique story.

In Hong Kong, where I live, prisoners in WWII planted gardens on the rooftop of Stanley prison, smuggling seeds from their food rations. In the UK, “Open spaces everywhere were transformed into allotments, from domestic gardens to public parks – even the lawns outside the Tower of London were turned into vegetable patches.”^[1] 

The Great Escape

In a prison camp in Germany in WWII, prisoners dug tunnels to escape the camp and concealed the tunnel dirt by working it into the soil of the garden. “While providing a long-term source of food and activity for prisoners, gardening also ironically cultivated the hope of escape by providing a cover for those intent on tunnelling out.”^[2] This may sound like a familiar story, as it was later made into the film: The Great Escape.

Hope and optimism

Gardens are uniquely hopeful. The very act of planting is hopeful. There is hope that something will grow, that someone will be there to see it, to enjoy it, or to harvest it.

Gardens in conflict zones can have many layers of meaning to those involved. They can provide food security, where access to food may be limited. They can provide refuge and solace; hope and optimism; a little bit of beauty.

The Last Garden, beautifully illustrated by Anneli Bray, commemorates the many war gardens and gardens for peace-building around the world.  Anneli Bray was recently longlisted for the Klaus Flugge Prize for her illustrations for The Last Garden: https://www.klausfluggeprize.co.uk/longlist-2021/

In the words of Audrey Hepburn: “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”

Find out more about the real gardens behind the story in the classroom resources and in the blog about war gardens on Rachel’s website.