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.