Category: Tours & Series

The BookBlast® 10×10 tour and the BookBlast® pandemic podcast series

Tours & Series | Top 5 Reads from The Children’s Bookshow 2023 | line-up 3

Although The Children’s Bookshow hits the road in the Autumn, tickets to many shows have already sold out and the remainder are selling fast. All performances include a free book for every child.

Marina Warner, the historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer, forms a persuasive case for fairy tales being a crucial repository of human understanding and culture in her very short introduction published by OUP. After all, they have the same core ingredients as most adult fiction: archetypal characters, conflict, desire, injustice, high octane drama, overcoming challenges, hope and heroism, beauty and blissful immersion in alternative worlds which reignite creativity and inspire new ideas. Their surreal magical quality and captivating illustrations make for a visual feast and offer a form of escapism from the real world around us. Continue reading Tours & Series | Top 5 Reads from The Children’s Bookshow 2023 | line-up 3

Tours & Series | Top 5 Reads from The Children’s Bookshow 2023 | line-up 2

For over twenty years, The Children’s Bookshow has tirelessly worked to promote, up and down the country, not only a love of reading, but also emerging and established children’s authors who are not TV celebrities chatting on a sofa.

In 2022, Michael Rosen, who was children’s laureate from 2007 to 2009, flagged up the problem that the promotion of the children’s book industry is generally celebrity-focused, “We are the Cinderellas of the book business, with very little media attention, so it’s small wonder that some children’s writers feel miffed by the fact that seemingly the only attention given to a children’s book is because the writer is already a star.”

The good news is that children’s books are getting more attention than ever before in the media, and today, The Children’s Bookshow is recognised as being an incredible asset to the book trade and an acknowledged talent-spotter. So we are delighted to share with you our second line up of authors and illustrators and their books on tour this year.

Continue reading Tours & Series | Top 5 Reads from The Children’s Bookshow 2023 | line-up 2

News | Top 5 Reads from The Children’s Bookshow 2023 | line-up 1

The Children’s Bookshow is back! The writers and illustrators of children’s literature touring the regions of England this year will be offering a fantastic variety of entertaining performances in which artists share stories, poems and live drawing, and talk to children about how they create. Siân Williams, founder of the tour back in 2000, was admirably astute in the way she took author events out of bookshops into much bigger venues, offering a great afternoon out to schoolchildren. The events are not organized from the point of view of the publisher and bookseller whose focus is just on selling books, so the atmosphere is like a gig or stand-up comedy performance and everyone has lots of fun!

#BookBlast is delighted to share with you the first line up of authors and illustrators and their books on show this year. More to follow . . . National treasure, Michael Rosen, will be performing again too.

See Michael Rosen in person: Peterborough – Wednesday 4 October BOOK TICKET(S)

Continue reading News | Top 5 Reads from The Children’s Bookshow 2023 | line-up 1

Breaking News | The Children’s Bookshow 2023 | book soon, don’t miss out!

The Children’s Bookshow brings the joy of books and reading to schoolchildren across the UK each autumn. This year, the much loved and hugely popular national tour of writers and illustrators of children’s literature features an exciting line up of authors and illustrators celebrating 21 years on the road.

“Stories can be like magic. Sometimes they’re the only way to make sense of the world,” Michael Rosen

stone age boy satoshi walker booksThe beautifully written-and-illustrated books showcased in the 2023 Children’s Bookshow feature a wide variety of stories and endearing characters. A favourite is Stone Age Boy by author and illustrator Satoshi Kitamura. A little boy walking along trips up, stumbles and falls into the Stone Age! He meets a girl his own age, and her tribe, and learns all about their way of life. He watches them make tools, clothes, weapons . . . He sees how they hunt, fish, cook, celebrate, and how they paint on the walls of caves. But when a furious cave bear attacks, he wakes up back in his own time where everyone tells him it was only a dream . . . Or was it?

Continue reading Breaking News | The Children’s Bookshow 2023 | book soon, don’t miss out!

Guest Review | Sharif Gemie | Markiyan Kamysh, Stalking the Atomic City trs. Hanna Leliv & Reilly Costigan-Humes | Pushkin Press

Stalking the Atomic City by Markiyan Kamysh must be one of the strangest examples of tourist literature ever written. Its focus is about visits to ‘the Zone’: the radioactive Exclusion Zone around the devastated nuclear power plant at Chornobyl (the Ukrainian spelling of the place). Markiyan Kamysh describes his frequent illegal visits to the Zone during the 2010s, before the Russian invasion. At first, these sound unbelievable. Why would anyone want to crawl through barbed-wire fences, run from border guards and — in winter — suffer below freezing temperatures as they spent days and nights sleeping rough in decaying apartments and collapsing industrial machinery?

Continue reading Guest Review | Sharif Gemie | Markiyan Kamysh, Stalking the Atomic City trs. Hanna Leliv & Reilly Costigan-Humes | Pushkin Press

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