Our Rights! – Children’s Rights
WITH the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights taking place in December of this year, Editor of Our Rights! Jake Hope introduces us to the anthology featuring stories, poetry and images celebrating and exploring the rights of young people as enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
C
HILDREN’S literature has a long history of focusing on ideas of fairness, justice and equality, whether
that be through novels like The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain or picture books like The Bad-Tempered Ladybird by Eric Carle.
This is something Amnesty International have really helped to showcase through a variety of initiatives including their endorsements and the Amnesty CILIP honour prize – where a panel of specially selected judges appraised the shortlists for the Carnegie Medals for Writing and Illustration, after which they selected their own winners, which were felt to bring to life and help children to engage with human rights.
This work and the subsequent symposium they arranged in 2019 underpinned the decision to create the anthology Our Rights!, a collection of poetry and short stories which help to raise awareness of children’s rights and the importance of these. Poetry, stories and pictures help to give shape and context to big ideas and concepts that can feel complex and a little abstract and
so felt the ideal way to help explore and highlight the importance of the rights. Editing the collection involved promoting children’s rights to authors and poets and encouraging the rights to be explored and unpicked.
New and established talent When selecting the poets and authors to include in the collection, it felt incredibly important to try to ensure that there was a base of diverse creators for the book. We were keen that readers of different lived experiences could feel that they were visible within the pages of the book, hopefully recognising that the rights extend to protect, unify and bind us all. We worked with emergent illustrator talent who had
Jake Hope (@Jake_Hope) is a freelance development and children’s book consultant, and former chair of CILIP’s Youth Libraries Group (YLG) and editor of Our Rights!.
www.jakehope.org.
participated in Pop-Up’s Pathways project. There has been a big industry focus on promoting and creating opportunity for diverse authors. Illustrators and illustration feel equally important.
Visual representation is often the first means via which we genuinely see ourselves represented in books. The Pathways project recognises this and has provided mentorship and support for new and emerging illustrators from under-represented backgrounds.
There was something really exciting in seeing how the illustrators visually
Autumn-Winter 2023
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