We are delighted to welcome author and illustrator Debi Gliori to the blog to introduce her new picturebook A Cat Called Waverley.  Debi studied illustration at Edinburgh College of Art and has been awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by Strathclyde University.  Debi has won the Red House Children’s Book Award and has twice been shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal.  Debi will be talking more about the highly affecting and important picturebook A Cat Called Waverley at the Youth Libraries Group annual conference this year – Representations of Place: New Lands and New Ways of Looking.

Some years ago, I visited a library in Glasgow to lead a storytelling session with an invited primary school class. Before the children arrived, the librarian showed me to the staffroom to drop my bags, and apologised in advance for the smell which, she said, was particularly noticeable in the ladies’ bathroom. She explained that in the colder parts of the year, the library was much prized by the local homeless population. She tilted her head to indicate where a few people sat slumped in forgotten corners of the library, dozing behind newspapers in the quiet warmth of the reading room. The librarian added in a whisper, they sleep here all day, waiting for their laundry to dry. Seeing my puzzled expression, the librarian continued; they wash their underclothes in the bathroom sinks, then drape them across the large Victorian radiators to dry. Imagine.

Indeed. Imagine that your life underwent an unforeseen and catastrophic shift. Imagine having to rely on the kindness of strangers for your survival. Imagine being blamed or shamed for allowing such a fate to befall you. Imagine having no agency, no voice, no vote and no sanctuary for when the winter comes. Back then, all those years ago in Glasgow, I chose not to imagine how appalling such a life would be. I had children to raise, books to write and, heavens, a class of seven-year-olds trooping into the library, wrinkling up their noses and loudly complaining about the smell.

Many years later, in an older and hopefully more empathetic version of myself, I met the human subject of my book A Cat Called Waverley; a homeless war veteran called Darren Greenfield. In my desire to devise a way to help him off the streets of Edinburgh without turning him into the subject of some well-intentioned children’s writer’s charity, I wove Darren’s life into a fictional tale of a war veteran and his faithful cat, Waverley. I hoped not only to highlight how easy it is to fall into homelessness, but also to begin a conversation with children, to shed light on this grotesque state of affairs that wilfully allows our fellow-humans to live without shelter on the streets of our cities. I also wanted to say to Darren - you matter. Your life story matters. It is wrong and unjust that you live on the streets while we live in houses, and hopefully this book will help ensure that such inequality becomes a thing of the past.

For many of us, the main point of contact we have with our homeless fellow-citizens is when we see them asking passing strangers for money on the streets of towns and cities around the UK. Or, when leafing through the broadsheet press, we encounter an advert exhorting us to give generously to one of the charities set up to support homeless people. Sadly, when most of us hear the word ‘homeless’ it doesn’t prompt a surge of empathy or engender more than the faintest wisp of fellow-feeling. Most of us have no direct experience of what it means to have nowhere to call ‘home’.

Whether this lack of empathy is a failure of imagination or a deliberate turning away is immaterial; it results in the same thing. We place a few coins in the outstretched hand and walk on by. We take a deep breath and turn the page. We blank out this unpleasant part of the reality of 21stC life. Moreover, we continue to vote for political parties that not only allow our fellow humans to live on the streets, but whose policies appear to actively encourage a moral climate where homelessness is commonplace. We are encouraged to demonise the unfortunate, to categorise people into strivers and shirkers and thus avoid any responsibility for our common weal. It’s an all-too common story, our collective blindness to inequalities and our morally deficient reluctance to step in to rewrite this potentially disastrous story arc.

Darren Greenfield’s story ended on the streets of Edinburgh. After several years he slipped through the inadequate net of social provisions we extend to our homeless fellow-humans. The news cycle paid brief attention. One more homeless person died on the streets of a first world city. Next?

With the ability to turn the world around me into a story, I’d managed to make over seventy books without once touching on the subject of homelessness. Until Darren. Mainly, I suspect, because I correctly guessed that such a book might not only be difficult to conceive and illustrate, but also that it could be tricky to find a publisher for such a project. I am delighted that not only did A Cat Called Waverley find an empathetic and principled publisher, but it also found the best home imaginable with Otter-Barry Books. Some stories do have a happy ending.

A big thank you to Debi Gliori for the blog and to Otter-Barry Books for the opportunity.