A Rich Alchemy Jake Hope interviews with Kate Greenaway Medal winner Jackie Morris.


Interest in art first began for Jackie Morris at age six, watching her father painting a lapwing. Jackie was captivated by the way it appeared to land on the page, as though alive, an alchemy she was eager to perform herself. The idea of this magic is something she attributes to The Lost Words, a book comprised of a series of spells written by Robert MacFarlane and illustrated by Jackie herself.


‘Working on The Lost Words, it was almost as if the wild was talking through us,’ Jackie explains. ‘When I was painting the wrens, everywhere I went there were wrens, under cars, even on the beach. People have told me they have visited The Lost Words exhibition and have never seen an otter, but have read the spell aloud three times and have seen one. There’s a type of magic in that. It’s frequency illusion, but it’s like a kind of summoning.’


Winner of the 2019 CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal, The Lost Words is a magnum opus that has taken on a life of its own. The impact and projects it has inspired have been too wide-reaching to capture. There has been a crowdfunding movement to get copies of books into schools, and Jackie has been amazed by the money, time and organisation people have invested into this. She describes a man who is on a pilgrimage walking coast-to-coast, carrying a copy, visiting schools and hosting assemblies. In London, the Royal


Orthopaedic Hospital has four floors full of images from the book put together by its designer Alison O’Toole. In New York, Jamie Burton, leader of the Boston Symphony Orchestra has set the acrostics to music for a boys’ choir describing music as simply spilling out of them. Commenting on what she thinks has made the book such a cultural phenomenon, Jackie muses, ‘too often, there’s a dearth of honesty and integrity in modern life.’ She feels people recognise the integrity of the book’s creative core: ‘Its success lies somewhere between the words and the images. The words make it so accessible to so many people. ‘


One of the groups Jackie is particularly pleased the book has appeal for is less confident readers. As a child, Jackie did not have access to books at home, ‘We didn’t have many books on our shelves, just some Readers Digests and a copy of the Bible.’ Jackie remembers being taken to the library: ‘The wealth that was in front of my eyes was astonishing. My parents didn’t take me to galleries, they knew nothing about art and couldn’t guide my reading as they knew nothing about children’s books. It was librarians that guided me, suggesting “You might like this”, or “take a look at this.” One of the first books she read where the world dropped away was Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. It feels an apt book for an author and illustrator whose work has been influenced so heavily by the natural world.


4 Books for Keeps No.237 July 2019


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