Tessa Strickland
Tessa Strickland is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Barefoot Books. In and around her professional responsibilities, she writes (sometimes as Stella Blackstone), reads and goes travelling. She also loves to dream and draw and drink wine with good friends and dig in her garden. She has two sons and a daughter, all in their twenties. Her home is in rural Somerset, which is also where she most likes to write. So these posts come from her garden bench in summer, and from her fireside in winter.
This post is the first in a series of reflections about books that have changed my life. Being unable to reduce my choice to just one book, I have chosen instead to look at my life in seven-year stages and to share the book I most remember from that time. The first of these has to be The Little Island. I don’t quite know how this picture book came into my childhood home, but it coloured my view of the world and of myself in a way that no other picture book ever has.
It’s sixteen years since I came across a rather quirky illustration on the cover of a paperback book on a shelf in a small bookshop in Ireland. I was doing a west coast walkabout, and as ever, my antennae were alert for signs of artistic talent. I flipped over the cover and saw the name ‘Niamh Sharkey’ in the illustration credit. Well, I decided I needed to track down this person. It turned out that she was on a rather more ambitious walkabout at the time — in fact, she was backpacking around Australia.
Readers of this blog who are familiar with Rob Ryan and Carol Ann Duffy’s picture book The Gift will not be surprised to hear that it has just been shortlisted for this year’s Kate Greenaway Medal. This is the most prestigious illustration award in the UK, though the illustrator was blithely unaware of the fact when he heard the news!
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young boy in need of an occupation will choose any activity but reading. Or is it? My experience as a parent was the reverse of this. Both of my sons loved to read from an early age. So I thought it would be interesting to ask them what they could remember about their first adventures in the land of literature. This is what they had to say (they are now in their mid-twenties):
Roll up, roll up! One of our best storytellers, Daniel Morden, is coming to Oxford with his company, ‘The Devil’s Violin’. He’ll be performing ‘A Love like Salt’ at the Bodleian Library on Friday evening at 7.30pm. If you are free to go along, you’ll be in for an unforgettable evening. Watch the video to find out more!
I am not an attentive follower of daily news, but this past week I sat up and took notice. The election results in Burma, returning Aung San Suu Kyi and 43 members of her National League for Democracy to the Burmese Parliament, made me want to dance in the street. Like many westerners, I have been inspired for decades by the quiet grace and heroism of this exceptional woman. I have also been inspired by the country to which she is committed: it is thirty years to the week since I was lucky enough to visit Burma.
… where the sun shone and the blossom blossomed and we had five days in which to turn twelve square metres into a Barefoot showcase, swap ideas, show new projects to our fellow publishers from the four corners of the world and hear their news too. Meetings, meetings, meetings!
On Thursday night, Beth and I put on our best frocks and sallied forth for the razmattaz of the Independent Publishers’ Guild‘s annual award presentations. We had put in an application for the Diversity Award–and we won it! The judges were especially impressed ‘by the company’s sustained commitment to cultural and ecological diversity across its publishing programme’.
Oh my goodness, March is already upon us. For Barefoot Books as a business, this means that the end of the first quarter is looming. So we huddle up in strategy meetings and stare at spreadsheets and rejoice when orders come in. For me personally, March has other resonances too, made more vivid this year by a spell of deliciously warm weather.
The editorial team is in a special place called appland. We are immersed in preparing our atlas app, which builds on the many facts and features of the print atlas with all kinds of new and extraordinary snippets of information and wonderful ways of exploring the planet in 3D.
