Liz Page Honoured by IBBY Ireland at Symposium on Children’s Books and War
IBBY Ireland held a symposium recently on the theme of children’s books in wartime. The symposium was dedicated to the memory of our dear deceased founding member Michael O’Brien and our honoured friend Sue Miller, who died while serving on the board of IBBY Ireland.
Among the speakers was Liz Page, until recently executive director of IBBY, who was invited to speak about the work of IBBY worldwide, especially in the face and aftermath of war. We were very glad to have Liz with us, because we had decided to award her the IBBY Ireland Honour 2024. IBBY Ireland has long admired Liz, and we like to believe that Liz reciprocates.
Citation by Dr Siobhán Parkinson on behalf of the board of IBBY Ireland
I am delighted to commend the recipient of the IBBY Ireland Award 2024 to all friends of IBBY Ireland, and indeed of IBBY worldwide. It is impossible to think of anyone so deserving of this honour, for our awardee has worked tirelessly on behalf of IBBY over almost three decades.
As IBBY people know, working on IBBY’s behalf means working on behalf of children, especially children caught up in war, famine, disaster, displacement and poverty, bringing into their lives, however stricken, the joy of the imaginative life that is the gift of children’s books. It also means working hard to realise Jella Lepman’s dream of building peace through children’s literature. Not only is our awardee deeply committed to the work of IBBY worldwide, but she also has a warm relationship with IBBY Ireland, and is a consistent visitor to this country to participate in IBBY Ireland events.
Liz Page, self-confessed ‘camp-follower’ from Birmingham to Basel; long-time-ago English books specialist with the Interkulturelle Bibliothek für Kinder und Jugendliche in your adopted city of Basel; over many years patient and tolerant right-hand woman to a range of high-profile IBBY leaders, from the legendary Helene Schar and Leena Meissen to Patsy Aldana and Peter Schneck; ‘probably’ the most widely travelled person on the planet; until recently executive director of IBBY worldwide from the mothership in Basel; chair of the 2024 Hans Christian Andersen medal jury; constant support and confidante of so many of us who are committed to IBBY; passionate, engaged, knowledgeable, experienced, cheerful hub of the fantastically fast-spinning wheel that is IBBY’s international work; Englishwoman, Swisswoman and citizen of the world, it is my inexpressible honour to confer, on behalf of IBBY Ireland, this honour on you, my old friend and long-time friend of IBBY Ireland.
Dr Siobhán Parkinson and Dr Patrick Ryan present Liz with charcoal drawing by PJ Lynch
After that joyful moment, the symposium opened with the keynote annual lecture, delivered on this occasion by Professor Andrew Pettegree of Saint Andrews University (in Scotland), which began with an account of Alison Uttley’s (1942) Hare Joins the Home Guard and went on to examine how war was represented in books and magazines for children in Britain around the time of
World War II, and also how children’s literature was used to promote NAZI ideology in Germany. There were depressing parallels to our own war-plagued times.
Click here to listen to Andrew Pettegree's presentation
On the following morning, picking up on the theme of World War II and its aftermath, Valerie Coghlan (President of Bookbird Inc) gave us a fascinating account of Jella Lepman’s life and work and the founding of IBBY. Valerie’s presentation led seamlessly into Liz Page’s overview of some of IBBY’s work internationally with children caught up in adult conflic
In the afternoon, we had two extraordinary and very different presentations on Ireland’s great mythic warrior hero Cú Chulainn, from Dr Becky Long and Professor Alan Titley, with an emphasis on the hero as child warrior (Becky) and on the subject of violence in a mythic story retold for young readers (Alan).
Many thanks to Dublin City University for their generous support of this symposium and, as always, to the Arts Council of Ireland for ongoing financial support of IBBY Ireland.
Books at War: The IBBY Ireland Annual Lecture and Symposium - Feb. 9-10 2024
Presented in 2024 in memory of
Michael O’Brien and Sue Miller
DCU IoE, St Patrick’s Campus, Drumcondra
9-10 February 2024
Friday, 9 February
Seamus Heaney Theatre, Cregan Library
6.00pm
Opening remarks
Presentation of the
IBBY Ireland Award 2024
6.15pm
IBBY Ireland Annual Lecture
Hare Joins the Home Guard: Children’s Books and War
Andrew Pettegree FBA
Professor of Modern History at University of Saint Andrews
Andrew Pettegree, the author of The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in a Time of Conflict, addresses the theme of war in children’s books
Followed by a reception
Saturday, 10 February
Room SPC.F218
Symposium
on the theme of war in children’s books
10.00am Registration and coffee
10.30am Valerie Coghlan on Jella Lepman (founder of IBBY): War and Peace
11.30am Liz Page on the international work of IBBY: Making Peace with
Children’s Books
12.30pm Lunch break (Lunch not provided)
1.30pm Rebecca Long: Cúchulainn as a Child Warrior in Irish Children’s Literature
2.30pm Alan Titley, author of a new children’s translation of The Táin
3.30pm Closing remarks
Each one-hour slot includes time for audience Q&A
No charge for attendance, register at EVENTBRITE:
We encourage donations to unicef.ie
Two PhD scholarships for Research into Indigenous Children's Literature
The International Research Society for Children's Literature List <IRSCL@JISCMAIL.AC.UK> On Behalf Of Nicola Daly announces two doctoral scholarships for research into Indigenous picturebooks in Aotearoa.
The organisers acknowledge the Marsden funding which has enabled these scholarships and work into a very important aspect of children's literature.
Full details at the links below:
UNGERER EXHIBITION AND RELATED EVENTS
‘In Memory of the Future’ is an exhibition running from 3 August to 30 September at dIr LexIcon. Over 50 artists will participate by sharing their interpretations of Ungerer’s work and responses to his influence. The show will run 3 August through 30 September at the dIr LexIcon Dún Laoghaire and it is free to the public.
The official opening of ‘In Memory of the Future’ will be at dIr LexIcon, on Thursday, 3 August at 6 pm, with Aria Ungerer. The event is free and all are welcome.
Later, in September, IBBY Ireland will host a lecture by Professor Emer O’Sullivan and other events exploring Ungerer’s life and work. These will take place at Alliance Française on Kildare Street, Dublin. Look out for further details regarding this event.
Tomi Ungerer was an artist and writer, winner of the Hans Christian Andersen medal in 1998, and in 2003 the first Ambassador for Childhood and Education appointed by the Council of Europe. Well-known for a visually stunning, witty, as well as subversive style, he produced over 140 children’s books, and was equally lauded for his adult and political books and artwork. From 1976 until his death in 2019, Ungerer resided in Ireland, dividing his time between West Cork and Strasbourg. His open and friendly presence resulted in his work influencing many of the illustrators, artists and writers who have emerged from Ireland over the last three decades.
Illustrators Ireland is curating this celebration of Tomi Ungerer’s life and work with support from IBBY Ireland, Alliance Française, Centre Culturel Irlandais, the French Embassy in Ireland, the Tomi Ungerer Museum, and Dún Laoghaire and Rathdown County Council. We are grateful for the support of Aria and the Ungerer Family.
Tomi Ungerer
Tomi Ungerer was an artist and writer, winner of the Hans Christian Andersen medal in 1998, and in 2003 became the first Ambassador for Childhood and Education appointed by the Council of Europe. Born in Strasbourg, his wartime experiences as a child saw him develop into an adult greatly opposed to intolerance and injustice. This resulted in a lifetime of political activism, as well as a hugely successful career as an illustrator, cartoonist, storyteller and satirist. Well-known for a visually stunning, witty, as well as subversive style, he produced over 140 children’s books, and was equally lauded for his adult and political books and artwork. Lured by jazz and a freedom to experiment, he moved to New York in 1955, where he soon found a publisher and for over a decade mixed with artists such as Stanley Kubrick, Günter Grass, Philip Glass and Tom Wolfe. The political turbulence of late 1960s America prompted a move to Nova Scotia, and then to Ireland in 1976. He spent the rest of his life between West Cork and Strasbourg, influencing many of the illustrators, artists and writers who have emerged from Ireland over the last three decades.
‘In Memory of the Future’ is an exhibition running from 3 August to 30 September 2023 at dIr LexIcon. Over 50 artists will participate by sharing their interpretations of Ungerer’s work and responses to his influence. The show will run 3 August through 30 September at the dIr LexIcon and it is free to the public.
Illustrators Ireland is curating this celebration of Tomi Ungerer’s life and work with support from IBBY Ireland, Alliance Française, Centre Culturel Irlandais, the French Embassy in Ireland, the Tomi Ungerer Museum, and Dún Laoghaire and Rathdown County Council. We are grateful for the support of Aria and the Ungerer Family.
Patricia Forde, New Laureate na nÓg
Patricia Forde, New Laureate na nÓg
IBBY Ireland sends its best wishes to Patricia Forde, Ireland’s new Laureate na nÓg. Patricia is a popular writer, with twenty-four children’s books in English and Irish to her name, with two more launching soon. A former primary school teacher, she has worked in TV, founded the Barboró International Arts Festival for Children and is a former director of Galway Arts Festival, Patricia writes picture books and books for children and tweens. Her picture books and novels have won many awards. IBBY Ireland very much looks forward to working with Patricia and supporting her term as Laureate na nÓg.
Tales of Two Torn Cities
Gerard Whelan
The Guns of Easter
O’Brien Press, 1996
Paperback, 166pp, €8.99
ISBN 978-0-86278-449-2
and
Elizabeth Laird
Oranges in No Man’s Land
Macmillan Children’s Books, 2006
Paperback, 116pp. £6.99 / €8.70
ISBN 978-0-330-44558-0
A difficult subject, war remains a common theme in children’s books. Such adventure stories appeal to writers and readers because they suddenly place you in the shoes of characters facing extremely bad situations, while their historical settings provide a safe distance to explore highly emotional experiences. They also offer a subtle way of examining what adults deem important.
With so many tales set during war, from The Iliad to World Wars I and II and even more recent conflicts, it’s natural that war novels share similarities. Consider Gerard Whelan’ The Guns of Easter, and Elizabeth Laird’s Oranges in No Man’s Land. Whelan’s is the first in a trilogy exploring Ireland’s Easter Rising, War of Independence, and Civil War, while Laird’s stand-alone piece happens during the Civil War in Lebanon. Both relate adventures of a child protagonist navigating unavoidable, dangerous excursions.
In Whelan’s book it’s 1916 and Jimmy Conway’s dad is away, fighting in the British Army. His Uncle Mick is with the Rebels, and his mother works hard to keep the family going. Set over the days just before and during the Easter Rising, the twelve-year-old’s loyalties are divided as he crosses the city, dodging army patrols, shootings, and disruption. Desperate to find food for his family, Jimmy encounters good and bad on all sides, and acquires a more mature understanding of himself and his relatives, and the struggles of his country.
Laird’s protagonist, ten-year-old Ayesha, must cross the Green Line on a forbidden journey through civil-war Beirut to get much needed medicine for her granny. This book also depicts delicate and long-established relationships between individuals from different religious and ethnic backgrounds damaged by a forcibly divided society.
Both books have many parallels. Their naive protagonists must both find paths through a war-torn city, negotiating with individuals on different factions of the conflict, while simultaneously finding everything familiar becoming unfamiliar and unexplainable. Missing parents, divided families and communities, changing loyalties, taking risks for loved ones, and a discovery of common humanity on all sides of a deadly conflict: these are recurring tropes in Jimmy’s and Ayesha’s exploits.
Although set during conflicts decades apart, in cities 3000 miles from each other, both novels follow the classic structure of children’s adventure stories, with realistic, sympathetic depictions of characters and settings. They are enthralling, immersive books that deserve to be widely read.
While Guns of Easter is for a slightly more advanced readership, with Oranges in No Man’s Land being shorter and having fewer historical facts to comprehend, it’s rewarding to explore both simultaneously with children. Together they work well in mixed-ability classes of intermediate readers.
Pat Ryan
The King of Ireland's Son / Story Telling New & Old | Padraic Colum
‘Fado Fado Fado’ or as it’s said in English, ‘Long Long Ago…’
‘Fado Fado Fado’ or as it’s said in English, ‘Long Long Ago…’
reviews of
Padraic Colum, illustrations by Willy Pogany
The King of Ireland’s Son
Dover Publications, 1997 (originally Macmillan, 1916)
Paperback, 320 pages
ISBN: 9780486297224
and
Padraic Colum
Story Telling New & Old
Macmillan, 1968 (originally published in Colum’s
The Fountain of Youth, Macmillan, 1927)
Hardback, 32 pages
ISBN: 9781476708942
In 1914, when a short visit turned into an unexpected longer-stay in America, with circumstances changing how he and his wife both made their livings, Padraic Colum indulged himself by translating from Irish into English traditional folk and fairy tales he’d heard as child. He did so to maintain his fluency in Irish. It led to a highly regarded reputation in the USA as an oral storyteller and writer for children (whereas at home and in the rest of Europe he was already established in the Irish Literary Revival as a dramatist and poet).
To earn a needed income, Colum published his fairy tales in the New York Tribune. These caught the attention of Hungarian illustrator Willy Pogany, who proposed they collaborate by putting the stories into a book. As an experiment, Colum wove the narratives into a novel, The King of Ireland’s Son. Well received by children and children’s librarians, the publishing house Macmillan offered Colum a lucrative contract; over subsequent decades, he produced for child readers several anthologies of folktales, legends, and myths from all over the world.
Colum’s first children’s book took the form of an epic. The King of Ireland’s son wanders out with his hound, his hawk, and his horse, and meets a stranger who invites him to gamble. Lulled by easy wins, the king’s son eventually loses the wager, and the stranger, an enchanter and enemy of his father, assigns the king’s son a hazardous task. On the journey to complete it, he becomes romantically entangled with the enchanter’s daughter, and they work as equals to defeat the villain. Magic chases and battles, eccentric characters, and wild escapades from Irish folklore are encountered on this quest, with disparate elements coming together to bring this adventure to satisfying conclusion.
Crafted from traditional folk tales, which normally provide minimal detail to describe characters, settings, objects, and actions, Colum’s writing style is reminiscent of early experiments in Modernism. This minimalism is reinforced by the English translation, which recreates or mimics Irish syntax while using oral storytelling techniques—rhythmic or formulaic language, poetic devices, and figurative speech, such as runs (repeated descriptive passages which incorporate alliteration and/or onomatopoeia). Colum’s mode of writing is supported by Pogany’s illustrations, which have been described as beautiful and bizarre in their use of brilliant colour and a startling Modernist style.
Colum’s children’s books remained popular in America well into the last century. I remember The King of Ireland’s Son as a favourite read. Coming back to it as an adult, I’m not so sure it remains accessible to young readers today. My memory, probably false, suggests I read it when I was eight or nine; more likely I was twelve or thirteen. Young adults keen on fantasy fiction would still enjoy it, I think. Recently, public librarians in Ireland read several children’s books by Irish writers and illustrators as part of a staff development project. Those who read The King of Ireland’s Son loved the book, saying it reminded them of Game of Thrones and contemporary young adult fantasy series based on Irish mythology.
Storytelling, New & Old was first included in Colum’s 1927 publication Fountain of Youth: Stories to be Told. The essay was republished several times, into the late 1960s. Colum describes the traditional storytelling of his youth, which he encountered in rural Longford and Cavan in the late 19th century. He then compares it with oral storytelling practiced by children’s librarians in public libraries.
Fountain of Youth consisted of stories meant to be told orally from memory, in a conversational style, without props or costumes. Such storytelling was expected of children’s librarians in North America from the 1890s through the 1930s and until recently was still common in some public library services. This library storytelling was aimed at children aged six to twelve who were told traditional folk and fairy tales, myths, and legends from around the world. This wasn’t the library story time material typically seen today for audiences aged five and under, which usually consists of rhymes and shared reading of picture books.
Colum defends this ‘modern storytelling’, demonstrating its similarities to Irish storytelling he heard as child. His eye-witness descriptions provide a window on this kind of storytelling and its place in Irish society for folklorists, anthropologists, and contemporary professional storytellers. Colum’s advocacy for the role of storytelling, poetry, and literature in child development, and his explanation of how listening to stories and poems develops imagination and what we would today recognise as critical literacy, means this essay remains relevant.
Pat Ryan
The Cat and the Devil | James Joyce | Little Island Books 2021
James Joyce, with illustrations by Lelis
The Cat and the Devil
Little Island, 2021 (illustrations 2012)
Hardback, 32 pages
ISBN: 9781912417919
Joyce’s grandson Stephen remembered that as a child he knew ‘Nonno’ was a famous writer whowrote complex and difficult books. Even so his Nonno found time, when Stevie was little, to sit with him and tell him stories in a language any boy or girl could understand. Many of Joyce’s friends recollected how Stevie crawled onto his grandfather’s lap and asked persistent questions which Joyce answered patiently in a Dublin drawl, offering increasingly fantastic replies.
Some of these ended up in correspondence. In August 1936, when Stevie was four, Joyce sent him a toy cat with sweets inside, smuggled under the noses of his parents. That inside joke, and a shared love of cats, led to The Cat and the Devil coming in a letter Joyce posted from Beaugency a few days after.
Based on a Beaugency folktale, The Cat and the Devil tells how a mayor makes a bargain with the
devil to have a much-needed bridge built overnight. The price is that whoever first steps across it
belongs to the devil—and the crafty mayor makes sure it’s a cat who crosses the bridge. Joyce added
humorous touches, such as depicting Beaugency’s mayor as Alfred Byrne, a famous Dublin politician
who was quite a character, and making jokes about the devil reading newspapers to find wicked
ideas and speaking French badly with a Dublin accent. Versions of the folktale, and countless
numbers of actual bridges attributed to the devil’s craftsmanship, exist in almost every European
country and as far away as the Caribbean, USA, and Argentina. Many of these folk tales and legends
are found in folklore anthologies and picture books in many languages.
But Joyce’s playful way with words make his version especially delightful, so that many countries
have published it. The latest edition, by Little Island, has wonderful illustrations by the Brazilian
illustrator Lelis (the book uses the images from an earlier publication in Portuguese from Brazil). Like
many other interpretations, the devil shares Joyce’s features.
A few weeks after Stevie received The Cat and the Devil, Joyce was in Copenhagen and sent his
grandson another letter with a story about cats. This eventually found its way into another children’s
picture book attributed to James Joyce, The Cats of Copenhagen—but that’s a story for another day.
Pat Ryan
James Joyce and Padraic Colum
James Joyce and Padraic Colum
A hundred years ago saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. So what better time for IBBY Ireland to remind everyone that Joyce also produced two children’s stories in letters to his grandson Stephen James Joyce. Although written in private correspondence for fun and with affection, both narratives experiment with language and reflect his extraordinary writing style. One of these tales—The Cat and the Devil—has been published as picture books a number of times in different countries. Another, The Cats of Copenhagen, is mostly limited to academic studies. These are delightful stories, comparing well with works by James Stephens and Padraic Colum, contemporaries of Joyce who wrote literary fairy tales for children.
Padraic Colum was known in Ireland as a poet and dramatist, and Mary Colum, his wife, as a respected writer and critic. Both were friends with James and Nora Joyce, promoted Joyce’s work, cared for Lucia Joyce when she was ill, and assisted Joyce while he wrote Finnegans Wake. In America, however, Colum was known for his children’s books. To maintain his native tongue, he translated from Irish to English traditional tales heard in childhood, weaving them into a children’s novel, The King of Ireland’s Son (illustrated by Willy Pogany). More children’s folktale anthologies followed, with three awarded retrospective citations for the Newbery Honor. Colum’s essay, Story Telling: New & Old, a comparison of traditional storytelling with storytelling by public librarians, continues to influence storytellers today.
Dublin City University and Trinity College Dublin have a forthcoming exhibition on Padraic Colum’s life and work. Stay tuned for further information on this celebration of a writer who pioneered Irish folklore and myth as fantasy for children.