in encouraging new parents to build books into their daily routine with their babies, the raising of awareness nationally of how important it is for a child’s life chances that they are introduced to and learn to love books from a young age.” At the moment Bloomsbury publishes around 20 new picture books per year, while the children’s non-fiction list adds around 10 to 12 titles. Probably the biggest picture book for 2022 is the “pacy, full of heart adventure story”, The Zebra’s Great Escape, which teams up star illustrator Sarah Oglivie with middle-grade bestseller Katherine Rundell, in the later’s first original picture book. (She had previously adapted Rudyard Kipling characters for Macmillan Children’s Books’ Into the Jungle.) Of those new talents brought to the list, Hancock name-checks actor turned début author Robert Tregoning’s Out of the Blue, with art by up-and-coming illustrator Stef Murphy, a tale of a boy who lives in a world where it has been decreed everything must be blue, but the boy loves yellow. Hancock says: “It’s a story of having the confidence to follow who you are, of pride and of difference.”
With all the distractions that children have now, it's incumbent on us to make books as appealing and attractive to them as possible
On the non-fiction side, Hancock says she is excited by
its “storytelling potential and showing new perspectives”. One of its hotest international rights properties going into Bologna has been Alexandra Stewart and illustrator Joe Todd-Stanton’s Kew: Darwin and Hooker, a story of the friendship and working relationship between Charles Darwin and botanist Joseph Hooker, who would go on to head up the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Hancock says that the book enables kids to learn about the litle-known story of Hooker’s influence on Darwin’s theories, and “allows you to really get into the time, look at the characters, as well as that sort of scientific information. So there’s a sort of a lovely, holistic approach about the story and the science that I think is so engaging”. Of course, illustrated non-fiction is having something of a moment, too. The category, it might be fair to say, was long the poor relation of the children’s world but publish- ers really started tapping into it aſter the Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls feminism boom (a boom, Bloomsbury has long somewhat tetchily noted, could arguably be said to have been kickstarted by its own Fantastically Great Women series by Kate Pankhurst, first published prior to the Rebel Girls books). But illustrated non-fiction has gone up another couple of notches lately, with huge recent hits like England footballer Marcus Rashford and Carl Anka’s You Are a Champion (Macmillan Children’s). Hancock says: “That we brought picture books and non-
fiction together suggests the synergies the categories have, and that they both have a global lens. I have a pet theory that non-fiction has exploded because we are in a time of an ocean of information and I think parents, and certainly I as a parent, would rather children had information that has been carefully curated and writen with them in mind.
TheBookseller.com
With all the distractions that children have now—from video games to TikTok—it’s incumbent on us to make these books as appealing and as atractive to them as possible.”
On the move Hancock’s father was in the military, so as a child she moved around a lot: “My mother’s line is that we had 20 houses in 20 years.” The family lived throughout the UK and abroad, including one year in the great plains in Canada. “We called it our Litle House on the Prairie because it was this remote place that had a back door that literally opened on a massive prairie,” she says. “It was a small tin-clad house with a basement which we had to go down to when the weather got scary—which it oſten did.”
Bloomsbury Children's Top picture/ non-fiction titles in 2022
01
36,582 units
We're Going on an Elf Chase Marth Mumford; Laura Hughes (illus)
02
31,229 units
Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World Kate Pankhurst
03
25,735 units
Ruby's Worry Tom Percival
04
SPREADS FROM SIMON PHILIP AND NATHAN REED'S ACHOO!
She read art history at St Andrews and originally wanted
to be an academic, but that did not pan out and she ended up working at a Dillons bookshop in Harrogate. She had something of an epiphany there, as she always loved looking aſter kids and enjoyed working with books, and realised she could fuse the two in a career. She started in publishing as a children’s rep for Oxford Universit Press, staying in sales for five years before moving across to editorial. That led to stints at Egmont and Simon & Schuster before she moved to Puffin. Ultimately, she loves the picture books/illustrated space as “I really believe in what we do. I was at the Edinburgh Book Festival a few years ago and a dad in the queue came up to me with a book we published, On Sudden Hill by Linda Sarah, and he said: ‘This is an important book as I have an autistic son and since we have read this book together, he’s gone into school and made his first friend.’ I really hold onto that because it shows we can make a difference. In a really strange and troubled world, that is something to hang on to.”
22,783 units
The Girl and the Dinosaur Hollie Hughes; Sarah Massini (illus)
05
22,520 units
You Can't Take an Elephant on Holiday Patricia Cleveland- Peck; David Tazzyman (illus)
17
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