This month we’re celebrating our illustrated books, with our Picture Perfect theme. Earlier this month we encouraged you to feast your eyes on the beautiful pages of Michael Cunningham’s dark and perverse collection of fairytales A Wild Swan and Other Tales and now, to lift your Friday, we have an interview with its illustrator, the amazing Yuko Shimizu.
Picture Perfect month presents us with the opportunity to showcase the cover of one of the best books published in many of our lifetimes. And it’s #tbt, which means that we can root around in the archives all the way back to…2009.
Wolf Hall was the first of Hilary Mantel’s mould-breaking historical novels about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s great minister. Mantel made Man Booker prize history by becoming the first woman and the first British writer to win the literary award twice, winning for both Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up The Bodies (2012).
Receiving the second price, Mantel joked: ‘You wait 20 years for a Booker prize and then two come along at once’.
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This month’s blog theme is Picture Perfect – we’re celebrating our illustrated books and graphic novels. So here’s an exclusive extract from Coco Moodysson’s Never Goodnight, the funny, nostaligic and affecting story of three Swedish schoolgirl punks who decide to form a band. The inspiration for Coco’s husband Lukas’s film We Are The Best!, its iconic black-and-white art is as punk as its subject matter…
A picture’s worth a thousand words.
This phrase kept coming to my mind when reading Malik Sajad’s wonderfully drawn Munnu: A Boy From Kashmir.
Sajad’s work tells a thousand stories of sorrow and loss during the whirlwind of political instability that surrounded Indian-administered Kashmir during the 1990s. The ink drawings come alive on the page as the reader becomes absorbed by the nightmarish conflict that engulfed Sajad’s childhood. Inspired by German expressionist woodcuts, Sajad has managed to create a world of shadows where death blends with life, ink with paper, Pakistani with Indian. Kashmir. The very word seems to echo the cries of all whose lives were torn apart.
Read more…
In celebration of one of our very favourite days of the year, Fireworks night, we bring you our very favourite whizzing, whirring, wheeling, burning moments in literature – moments where fireworks symbolise everything from sexual impotence, passionate friendship and perishable beauty. Each moment offering proof that, after all, ‘no one talks cant about fireworks’. Read more…
This month’s theme, Picture Perfect, celebrates the image. Be this through graphic novels, food photography, cover design or how to post the perfect Instagram pic, we want to share with you all the ways in which the picture is truly perfect. First off, Malik Sajad, author of Kashmiri conflict memoir MUNNU, tells us about the technical process behind the creation of his graphic novel.
