IN DEPTH


Author Profile Jim Field


Jim Field makes his author-illustrator début with the perfect picture book for budding language learners


Sophie Scott-Foss 34 17th October 2019


S


truck by the discernible lack of bilingual titles avail- able for children, illustrator Jim Field, perhaps best known for his work on the rip-roaringly successful


Oi series, has taken on the mantle himself. Monsieur Roscoe: On Holiday is Field’s début as author-illustrator and follows the eponymous canine as he and his pet goldfish, Fry, go on holiday to visit friends and learn new French words along the way. The impetus behind the book is to “introduce a language at a young age but in a fun way”, and by interweaving vibrant pictures with simple vocabulary, Monsieur Roscoe: On Holiday is sure to entertain even very small children. This is a subject particularly close to Field’s heart—he lives in Paris, where he and his wife, a native French speaker, are raising their daughter to be bilingual. Over the phone he tells me how the new title was inspired by a trip he and his family took to a bookshop in search of something in English and French. On noting that there “wasn’t really much there, mainly just dictionaries”, he mused, “maybe I could do something about this”. The idea


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