FESTIVITIES ARE SET FOR BOLOGNA AND SHARJAH – Dianne Hofmeyr

Lili: Red Hot Hair – Wen Dee Tan 

Following hot on each other heels two of the biggest book fairs dedicated solely to children’s books are about to ignite the World of Reading. Flights are full, books are packed, dummies designed, illustrations couriered, appointments scheduled, comfy shoes packed and for those lucky enough to be invited to a few soirees, a silky shirt or twinkly top or two. 

When the Bologna Book Fair opens its doors officially on the 4th April, it will have been established as the leading children’s Book Fair for more than 50 years. On the other hand the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival (SCRF) in the United Arab Emirates, which begins on 20th April, only started 8 years ago, but with it’s 11 days of discovery, creativity and excitement, is intent on creating a second Bologna in the Middle East.

I’m lucky enough to be going to both – to Bologna under my own steam to ease two new babies into the world – a picture book, The Glassmaker’s Daughter, illustrated by Jane Ray coming out with Frances Lincoln in 2017 and a second picture book, My Daddy’s a Silly Monkey, illustrated by Carol Thompson coming out with the brand new Otter-Barry Books, also in 2017.

At Bologna I will be browsing and soaking up the sheer energy of everything new in publishing for 3 days, (sipping a few glasses of prosecco along the way)

Whereas at Sharjah Children's Reading Festival,  IBBY UK have been invited as Guests of Honour by UAE IBBY and have included Alexis Deacon as their guest illustrator and me as their guest writer, Alexis and I will be working at full tilt in schools and on panels with more than a little back-up from Sophie Hallam of IBBY UK and Julia Eccleshare.

So this week sees me suddenly panicking. Pasting up dummies, searching through my more than 19, 950 images (I'm determined to keep it under 20, 000) in iPhoto for high resolution pics, running to the printers for business cards and generally creating more chaos than needed when I wake in the night and uninvited decide I can use my illustrator’s images to make endpapers for a Bologna dummy. What astounding cheek! But perhaps collaboration at it’s fullest.

The best part of being at a Children’s Book Fair is not just the pleasure of meeting like-minded people and feeling the buzz but having the books and illustrations take centre stage. At Bologna this year 3191 illustrators submitted work from 61 countries. Being selected offers an illustrator huge visibility as after the Fair, the exhibition tours to Japan, China and the United States. This year will see solo exhibitions of British illustrators Laura Carlin, for winning the Cover Illustration Award for this year’s Exhibition and Miasie Shearring for winning the Fundación SM International Award for Illustration last year.

At Sharjah, one of seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates and recently named the Islamic Culture Capital, there is also an annual Illustration Award. Appropriately last year’s winner was Wen Dee Tan from Malaysia for Lili: Red Hot Hair. 

ROLL ON BOLOGNA AND SHARJAH! 

Let the festivities begin! Lead on! IGNITE THE WORLD OF READING!

www.diannehofmeyr.com

Giraffes Galore… the journey of a book – Dianne Hofmeyr.

Excuse the light-heartedness. It's Spring after all. So pop the champagne corks, blow the party hooters… today a picture book story I wrote 15 years ago is being launched at The Illustration Cupboard in London. The timing seems right. Everywhere I look there are giraffes galore – in the windows of Kath Kidson, in the Louis Vuitton ads ...

... but best of all on the cover of my new book, Zeraffa Giraffa.

In my notebook I found the date when my story started taking shape – August 1999. 

I’d just read the historical account in Michael Allin’s book Zarafa of the giraffe that was sent to Paris by the Pasha Muhammed Ali in 1827 – the second giraffe ever to be seen in Europe. But my fascination with giraffes began as a teenager when I’d come up really close to them in the wild on horseback in Zimbabwe – that graceful walk, their necks stretching out above the tree-line like exotic flowers, their lolloping gallop, their bizarre stance when drinking and their stares of curiosity.  

So why did my manuscript take 15 years to be published? 

Take heart those of you who have texts in your bottom drawer. Some stories are often just not right in a certain market – the perfect illustrator can’t be found… the economics don’t work. Then in 2004 I saw the magnificent life-size puppet performance of The Tall Horse based on the same story I'd written, produced by the Handspring puppet company in South Africa (it went on to tour in the US and Europe as well). The Handspring is the same company who much later produced the horse in War Horse. Their 5 metre tall giraffe of my story was made of carbon fibre rods, with two puppeteers on stilts inside the body frame, operating the turn of the head, the twitch of a tail or ear and the swaying, graceful gait. I was so mesmerized by the poetic performance that I still have the program and ticket. I can tell you that on Thursday 9th Sept 2004, I sat in seat N1 at the Baxter Theatre, Cape Town.

the giraffe puppet from the production The Tall Horse

Zeraffa Giraffa is essentially a story of a journey of a giraffe who travels from Khartoum with her keeper Atir, down the Nile to Alexandria and across the sea to Marseilles, and finally walks to Paris… not as easy assignment for an illustrator. Who better than Jane Ray? She has captured brilliantly a sense of Africa as well as France in her wide double-paged vistas. We sense both the heat and shimmer of the desert and the contrasting softness of the French countryside without the book losing its fluidity. 

Her palette is strong, her colours intense, the detail sublime – tiny dots of gold highlight the texture on the giraffe’s horn, a sinuous, long, black tongue entwines the curls of the equally black French railing, an inquisitive monkey on the dhow, strange boxes with Arabic font and measurement ... what do they contain?... scraps of maps embedded in the sea suggesting the journey – wonderful, tiny, visual codes that will be picked up by an astute child. (perhaps even by an adult?) 

While I was writing Zeraffa Giraffa, I went to the Jardin des Plantes alongside the Seine in Paris to see the building of La Rotonde where the giraffe was housed together with her keeper, Atir. He slept up on a platform close to her face and remained with her for the rest of the 18 years she lived. I tried to imagine the bond that must have existed between them … two exiles from Africa… a boy who had never been further than Khartoum and a giraffe who had lost her savannah ... both alone in this strange, foreign city. What memories did they hold on to? 

Then a few days ago I saw an article in a newspaper about Mario, a zookeeper who has a brain tumour and can no longer walk, whose last wish was to see his beloved giraffes he’d looked after at the Rotterdam zoo. He was taken there by the Ambulance Wish Foundation. The newspaper shows a photograph of a tall giraffe bending low over a fence and nuzzling the face of the zookeeper as he lies strapped to his ambulance stretcher. What greater bond than that?

If you visit La Rotonde on a quiet day, close your eyes and perhaps you’ll feel the hot wind of Africa and imagine yourself standing there with Zeraffa and her keeper Atir, while he whispers stories to her of a land far away.

My giraffe and I have been on a long, long journey together. The giraffe’s journey took two years, mine took fifteen. Thank you Jane you’ve made the story come alive. Let’s pop those corks and blow the party hooters. Perhaps like the bakers of Paris, we might even celebrate with giraffe biscuits!

Zeraffa Giraffa, by Dianne Hofmeyr, illustrated by Jane Ray, published by Frances Lincoln, April 2014, translated so far as well, into Danish, Swedish, Korean and Afrikaans.
www.diannehofmeyr.com