Ho-HO! It is that time of year again when Becky Palmer and I start a day late on our gloopy pot of Christmas comic jam and continue posting a panel a day (sometimes with gaps and gluts) throughout advent. If your toast needs MORE jam, you can catch up with our 2013 and 2014 comics here or on Becky’s blog, and ahem well I’m to go first:
Tag: stories
Alfons, Alfonso, Antero and Ingolf
¡Estoy muy muy emocionado porque mi próximo libro va a ser publicado en ocho idiomas! Me gusta especialmente el nombre danés ‘Ingolf.’
ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! will be published in Dutch by Lemniscaat, Finnish by Lasten Keskus, Spanish by El Naranjo, French by Albin Michel, German by Aladin, Italian by La Marguerita –Ellebi and Danish by Jensen & Dalgaard. Oh and English too I spose.
ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO!
Here is an advance copy of my second book, ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! to be published by Walker in March 2016.
I have been drawing monsters for a very long time and am so excited to see some of them (almost) about to be loosed into the wild… I’ll write more about the book closer to publication, or there’s a little snippet here.
Good times for the parrot
Some exciting things have happened to my first book in recent weeks: there’s going to be a Danish edition, Pigen med papegøjen på hovedet, published by Jensen & Dalgaard in February 2016; I also heard that The Girl with the Parrot on her Head is a finalist in the Golden Pinwheel Young Illustrators Contest (which means the illustrations will be in an exhibition at Shanghai Children’s Bookfair this week) AND some lovely librarian has nominated it for, of all things, the Kate Greenaway Medal!
The UK paperback will be out in January, and Candlewick will publish the US hardback in April.
Launching the parrot
The Girl with the Parrot on her Head has been out in the world for two days now, stomping about, sneaking into bookshops. Already Julia Eccleshare has written about the book at LoveReading4Kids where it’s also debut of the month! EXCITING TIMES. I’ve written about the process of making The Girl with the Parrot on her Head over on Walker’s blog Picture Book Party (where you can also find out how to make a parrot, or SOMETHING ELSE, to live on your head).
Two days before publication we had an amazing launch party at Daunt Books in Hampstead (thanks to Trudi Esburger for the better photos). If I’d put as much thought into the speaking part as the snackfoods I might have said something sensible. We had bears, hula hoops, not-actually-broken-umbrellas and truly incredible wolf biscuits by my cake-genius friend Emily of Love & Cake.
We also had a lot of lovely people and a counter covered in books. In a weird reversal of my expectations, we ran out of books and had wine left over. It was totally predictable, however, that the wolves all vanished in no time at all.
Here are my entirely brilliant Editor and Designer from Walker Books:
Me drawing in books (when does it stop feeling like defacing school property?):
And illustrators! Some of the many excellent friends, family and book-people who made it so grand:
Very many enormous thanks to everyone who helped and all who came along!
Follow Emily of the wolf biscuits @MissWilko or on Instagram.
Read about the making of The Girl with the Parrot on her Head at Picture Book Party.