Italian author Gianni Rodari wrote many beloved children's books and was awarded the prestigious Andersen Prize. But he was also an educator of paramount importance in Italy and an activist who understood the liberating power of the imagination. He is one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors for children, and Italy's greatest. Influenced by French surrealism and linguistics, Rodari stressed the importance of poetic language, metaphor, made-up language, and play. At a time when schooling was all about factual knowledge, Rodari wrote The Grammar of Fantasy, a radically imaginative book about storytelling and play. He was a forerunner of writing techniques such as the "fantastic binomial" and the utopian, world engendering "what if...." The relevance of Rodari’s works today lies in his poetics of imagination, his humanist yet challenging approach to reality, and his themes, such as war and peace, immigration, injustice, inequality, and liberty. Forty years after his death, Rodari’s writing is as powerful and innovative as ever. He died in Rome in 1980.
"To draw is to tell. Everyone who feels emotion has something to tell. Emotions keep on changing, growing, as children do. My drawings and stories change with them." —Beatrice Alemagna
Beatrice Alemagna was born in Bologna, Italy in 1973. She has written and illustrated dozens of children’s books, which have received numerous awards all over the world and have been translated into 14 languages. She has also had solo exhibitions in France, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Sweden, and Japan. Alemagna's The Wonderful Fluffy Little Squishy and Child of Glass are also published by Enchanted Lion.
Matthew Forsythe lives in Montreal where he draws and paints for picture books,
comics, and animations. His picture book Pokko and the Drum was a Publishers Weekly and NPR Book of the Year and won a Boston Globe / Horn Book Honor and Charlotte Zolotow Honor.
Jack Zipes is a renowned children’s historian and folklorist who has written,
translated, and edited dozens of books on fairytales. He is a professor at the
University of Minnesota.
