Skip to main content

Day 24: IBBY Germany


I had a fantastic visit to the IBBY Germany office after work tonight. The head of the organisation Doris Breitmoser welcomed me warmly, and introduced me to her workmates, and then we sat down with lovely green tea and a tasty German christmas treat while Doris talked to me about some of the work IBBY Germany does, including a recent 5 year programme of literanauts which are groups of young adult readers promoting reading, and facilitating the awarding of German literature awards. Doris showed me the winning books for 2017, including the winning picturebook ‘Nobody comes through here!'  - very postmodern, and the winning non-fiction picturebook called 'Bees'.  

One interesting thing about these awards is that they are open to books written in German, but the author/illustrator can be from anywhere in the world. Doris explained this followed on from the vision of Jella Lepman (who I’ve written about before- she founded the library I am working at) who believed in German children learning about the rest of the world through children’s literature. That is an interesting quality (and relatively unusual in the world of awards, I believe) which made me think.

 After my visit to the office we went to the opening of the Munich Literature Festival. Once the opening which gave a taster of several of the featured authors (including a famous German writer and illustrator Paul Maar) was complete, we got to look at the children’s literature stands of many beautiful books.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 17: Attitudes to language

A few more books have come up from the stacks, and I have enjoyed a day back analysing some picturebooks, this time relating to attitudes to language. One I’d like to share with you is Yoko Writes her Name (Wells, 2008), an anthropomorphic tale of a kitten at kindergarten called Yoko who can write her name and numbers in Japanese. Some of the children in the class make fun of here and tell her she will not graduate from kindergarten, but the teacher, Mrs. Jenkins, decides that the class will have Japanese as a second language, and Yoko helps her classmates learn to write their names in Japanese Katakana script. This story reflects many different attitudes towards bilingualism, and presents many opportunities for children to start to learn to think about what characters in the story may be feeling. At the start of the story Yoko’s mum says she is proud of Yoko for writing her name. The text states “Yoko could write her name perfectly”, and the illustrations show she is writing...
Post a Comment
Read more

Day 2: The Research begins

Today was another warm autumn day, a pleasure to walk to work in. I arrived at 9.30 and started looking through the box of books I ordered through the IJB catalogue before I arrived. It is very difficult searching for books which are multilingual as this is not a tag in the search criteria. The books found were a mixture of quite a few bilingual Japanese/English books, and a selection of books featuring English and a minority language such as Cree, Spanish, Inuktituk and Greenlandic. There were also three picturebooks featuring characters discussing issues relating to being bilingual, for example in Yoko Writes her Name  (Rosemary Wells, 2008),   Yoko can write her name in Japanese and English. Her classmates respond with jealousy and in the process draw on several common prejudices around bilingualism. The search also did   manage to identify 5 picturebooks with between 3 and 5 languages in them, and I spent most of the day really enjoying analysing the linguistic ...
1 comment
Read more

Day 27: Two gone, two left

I have had a very nice weekend since I last wrote, including a trip to the local shopping centre and a last art gallery trip. The local shopping centre is big and it was busy. As there is no Sunday shopping here I guess everyone has to do their shopping on Saturdays. Things are expensive so not too much money was spent, but it is always interesting looking.   Several people had recommended Lenbachhaus for my last art gallery. It contains a collection from the Blue Rider, and expressionist painting group who included Kandinsky and Gabriele Munter who lives in Munich for some time. Their work is gloriously colourful which was a nice counterpoint to the grey day.  http://www.lenbachhaus.de/ausstellungen/sammlungspraesentation/der-blaue-reiter/ Yesterday (Monday) was a day of writing for me. I have three journal articles on the go, and I like to roam from one to the other, a bit like a bee with flowers, I like to think. And, yes, cross pollination does occur! It is wonderful...
Post a Comment
Read more