An Appreciation of Children's Literature
Last night I saw my fourth Bath Children's Literature Festival talk, this one was all about how brilliant children's writing is. For those of you who didn't know that... it's a fact. A great panel led by editor Danny Hahn who was joined by authors David Almond [the man who has won pretty much everything], Sally Gardner and Pushkin Press publisher Adam Freudenheim. There were lots of great points made, but again I'm going to streamline them so as not to waffle... yes, yes we all know I'm going to do that anyway. Listening to how Adam decided to launch the Pushkin Press children's list was one of the most interesting things. He was originally working with Penguin Classics and a lot of the work involved in that was translating books for the range. Looking at the range of children's books there are these days very few are translated from other languages compared to adult fiction, which in itself has very few translated books. So many fantastic storie...