The Society of Children's Books & Illustration lovers Volume 4 Nov 2013 | Page 3

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The Society of Children’s Books & Illustration Lovers – Newsletter #4 – November 2013

Editors’ letter

Mad about books!
Welcome to November’s newsletter!
Can you believe that this is already our fourth meeting? And the number
of children’s books lovers attending the meetings is starting to grow very
nicely as well. It is great to be able to spare just an hour a month to talk
about books with such a bunch of interesting people, don’t you think?
November is Picture Book month (well, at least in the USA) so we all
decided to dedicate our next meeting to the “picture book” section of the
Stockport Schools Book Award: Mad about books (see books on the
cover). Even though the winners will have been announced by then, we’ll
still have our own competition and see if our predictions match the final
results. They are all wonderful books but I have already picked my
favourite one, and well…have decided to dedicate the “Illustrator of the
month” section to no other than the absolutely brilliant Helen Stephens,
author of “How to hide a lion”. Her creative process is fascinating (see
interview below) and her illustrations so simple and so effortlessly
effective. I love them! I hope you find her description of how “How to
hide a lion” came about interesting.
Our international illustrator of the month, Sergio Bumatay is actually from
the Philippines and I selected him because we have a new comer to the
group who I think would be pleased to know that there are a lot of
talented people working in her native home. I hope you like them as
much as I do!
November is also Michael Morpurgo’s first ever month and I wanted to
pay him homage by selecting a few of his wonderful picture books,
instead of his well-known junior fiction. Which ones have you read?
And finally, in other news, just a little call to all of you, creative minds,
interested in collaborating with a new project dedicated to children’s
literature that comes originally from Spain. It’s called Atrapavientos.
Intriguing? Read on and find out more!
See you soon,
Susana Sanchez-Gonzalez
The travelling librarian

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