Drawing Words is a new exhibition of children’s book illustration commissioned by the British Council, curated by the Children’s Laureate, Lauren Child.
The exhibition brings together some of the most exciting children's book illustration to come out of the UK in recent years − celebrating illustration as an art form for all ages.
While Peter Rabbit, Paddington Bear and Winnie the Pooh are universally recognised and demonstrate the rich history of children’s book illustration in the UK, Drawing Words looks to the future with contemporary illustrations of long-established illustrators as well as artists who are at the beginning of their career.
“Illustrators invent worlds. They can invite you to step into the detail of a painted woodland, a woodland so decorative that you might lose yourself in the page. Or they might encourage you to notice how extraordinary the ordinary can be once drawn in black and white and bricks, pavements and tiles have been translated into pattern. An illustrator may find and adapt anything: a comb, a stone, a peg, a piece of old cardboard can be employed to construct a three-dimensional collaged city, created to challenge the way you think about your own world”. Lauren Child
The artists
- Jill Calder, Robert the Bruce (Birlinn)
- Lauren Carlin, A World of Your Own (Phaidon)
- Rebecca Cobb, Aunt Amelia (Macmillian Children’s Books)
- William Grill, The Wolves of Currumpaw (Flying Eye Books)
- Emily Hughes, Wild (Flying Eye Books)
- Yasmeen Ismail, Time for Bed, Fred! (Bloomsbury)
- Neal Layton, Emily Brown and the Thing (Hodder Children’s Books)
- David Mackintosh, Marshall Armstrong Is New to Our School (HarperCollins)
- Emily Rand, A Dog Day (Tate Publishing)
- David Roberts, Tinder (Hachette)
The Drawing Words exhibition is part of the European Literature Day 2019, an annual festival organised by EUNIC, the association of European Cultural Institutes and Embassies.The vivid literary festival with contributions from ten European countries are always full of activities for book lovers of any age, including book presentations, readings, workshops, talks, exhibitions and film screenings.