It’s September! We’re here, we made it! It’s time to celebrate children’s books in translation. I’ll be posting book reviews on here, but join us over on the World Kid Lit Blog for more reviews, articles and interviews.
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Guest Blogger for Lantana Publishing
I’m feeling very privileged to have been asked to contribute to the Lantana Publishing Blog, newly relaunched to celebrate their fifth birthday. You can read my thoughts on why translated and world books are so important for our children.
You can also find out more about their fantastic initiative A BOOK FOR A BOOK in collaboration with ReadforGoodUK !
Just So Festival Highlights
This weekend we went to the Just So Festival at Rode Hall in Cheshire. This festival has become something of a regular in our family diary and we’ve been looking forward to it for ages. This year was set to be something special with the festival celebrating its 10th Anniversary.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Just So Festival, it is a celebration of the arts, creativity and imagination, mixing outdoor theatre, music workshops and performances with clay modelling, campfire songs and dressing up. Where else do you see whole families in sparkly sequin fish costumes or dressed as a pride of lions, trying to win golden pebbles for their tribe? This year, we chose to be bees with our tribe coming a respectable 4th place in the Tribal Tournament.
An absolute highlight of the weekend was seeing Biscuithead and the Biscuit Badgers. If you haven’t come across their music and you have young children, you really should. They have some ridiculously funny songs including David Attenborough, the Skeleton’s Foxtrot and the kids are still running around this morning singing their favourite: I’ve got my finger up my nose!
Clearly the weather decided this year needed to memorable too and checking the forecast on the run up to the festival, it soon dawned that this year was going to be soggy, soggy, soggy and muddy, muddy, muddy! So muddy in fact, we had to be towed off the car park by a tractor at the end – what could be more fun when you’re 8!
Here’s a selection of our some of our highlights.
Arrival at the Festival 
Mud Glorious Mud 
Giant Scrabble in the rain 
Bonfire Bands 
The Woodland Library 
The Giant Balloon Show by Dizzy O Dare . Yes, that is a man with a giant balloon on his head! 
The Fabularium back with their new show the Hare and the Moon 
Mrs Bee 
Lifted by Mimbre 
Dancing at the Flamingo Lounge 
Bubble Hour 
A visit to travelling children’s bookshop How Brave is the Wren 
Clay Faces 
Woodwork at Hammer and Chisel 
The view from the back of the tractor 
Biscuithead and the Biscuit Badgers
5 Books about Cats for International Cat Day
Today it’s International Cat Day, and so to celebrate our furry friends, here are five books all about cats.
- Mog by Judith Kerr. There are loads of Mog books, like this Christmas book in the picture. Written by the late great Judith Kerr, who could fail to be charmed by Mog.
- To be a cat by Matt Haig. What would you do if you woke up tomorrow as a cat? Barney Willow is about to find out.
- Oi Cat! by Kes Gray and Jim Field. Rhyming galore in the fabulous second Oi! book. If you haven’t come across these yet, they are well worth a read!
- Lost and Found Cat by Doug Kuntz and Amy Shrodes. A real-life tale of a family fleeing Iraq who take their cat with them. On arrival in Lesbos, Kunkush the cat gets lost. Thanks to volunteers and a campaign on social media, Kunkush is eventually reunited with his family.
- Flucht by Niki Glattauer and Verena Hochleitner (in German). A family fleeing from war, written from the cat’s perspective.
See more book reviews
Reflections on the Warwick Translates Summer School
A couple of weeks ago I attended the Warwick Translates Summer School. Last year I participated in the BCLT Summer School on the Spanish strand, so this year I took my place on the German workshop with the amazing Katy Derbyshire.
We had been given a selection of texts to prepare before the event, and while I say prepare, this wasn’t to translate in advance but rather read through and understand. We had one long text to work on every morning – an excerpt from a book – and then each afternoon we looked at a shorter text from a “literary-adjacent” field. These ranged from biographies for a museum to a humorous newspaper column and even included my favourite: a children’s picture book!!
It was great to be working in such a supportive, encouraging environment, taking a line or a sentence at a time to produce a finely honed translation. There’s always a fear that your suggestion is going to be wrong or you’re going to look ridiculous. Within the larger German group, we split down into smaller groups of 3-5 people which allowed suggestions to be put forward in relative safety; if it was a silly suggestion, at least you were only saying in front of 3 other people! But this also meant that it felt like a safe place to put forward more daring solutions and learn from others whether they thought those solutions were successful or not. I can imagine group dynamics play a large part to creating that security, but in this I was very fortunate to find myself with a roomful of lovely and talented people.
In addition to the workshops themselves, there were also a number of lunchtime and evening sessions, some of the most useful being about how to pitch to publishers and conversations with publishers and editors.
One of the things I have learnt in this industry is how important it is to talk to people and make connections. This was a great opportunity to meet like-minded people and to forge those connections. Working alone in an office with a computer can sometimes feel quite isolated so it’s great to know that there are others out there at the end of an email.
It was a very intense few days with lots of information but I left with my head full of ideas and the conviction that this is the area I want to work in. It’s now down to me to move my business forward and make it work for me.
Claire Storey 