Community groups and food banks across Wales have added children’s books to the list of resources and support they are able to provide for families from this spring. As part of the Welsh Government’s book-gifting campaign, the Books Council of Wales have supplied over 40,000 books to food banks, community organisations and other local groups to make books available to children and young people in their local communities.
Nurturing a love of reading sits at the core of the Books Council of Wales’ work. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic they have delivered several book-gifting campaigns with selected groups such as families, young carers and looked-after children. Providing books and resources was one way to support children and families through the effects of the pandemic, such as social isolation and the impact on their mental health and wellbeing.
One of the main aims of this Schools Love Reading book-gifting programme is to provide a choice of high-quality and engaging reading resources for families to use at home.
“It’s been wonderful to work with our friends and partners at the Trussell Trust, FareShare Cymru, IFAN (Independent Food Aid Network) and many community groups across Wales to deliver these books for children and young people. We chose these high-quality books from amongst the best-selling titles produced by publishers in Wales to include a wide range of age ranges, subjects and titles so that everyone can choose the right book for them. We’d like to thank all the publishers who have worked so hard to make these books available for children across Wales to enjoy.”
Shoned Davies, Schools Love Reading Project Manager at the Books Council of Wales
This is the first stage in the book-gifting scheme. The next stages of this multi-million-pound investment in reading engagement include the gift of an individual book for every learner between the ages of 3 and 16 via all state schools in Wales, and a programme of Schools Gifting, where each state school will receive a specially chosen selection of books for their school library.
The Schools Love Reading programme will mean that learners across Wales have equal access to a diverse range of appealing and quality literature, in Welsh and English, that has been specially selected for children and young people.
“Reading is a fundamental skill in just about every aspect of life. I want to ignite a passion for reading for all our children and families. Through this exciting book-gifting initiative, as part of the £5m additional funding from Welsh Government, I want to ensure that every learner in Wales has a book of their own to keep.”
Jeremy Miles, the Minister for Education and Welsh Language
About the publishers The books included in this phase of the Schools Love Reading programme are high-quality titles from amongst the best-selling children’s books produced by publishers in Wales. They cover a variety of age ranges, subjects and include titles in both Welsh and English, so that every child or family can choose the right book for them.
Participating publishers are: Graffeg Publishing Firefly Press Candy Jar Books Atebol Welsh Children’s Books by Dref Wen Rily Publications Y Lolfa
My novel, The Song that Sings Us has had some lovely things said about it by reviewers and writers. I think my favourite came from Imogen Russell Williams reviewing the book for the Guardian: ‘story-telling at the most poetic scale, strange, bloody, grand and unforgettable’. Comments like this are wonderful of course, but what every writer wants is feedback from real readers. Thank you to Grace, age 11, in National Geographic magazine for saying that the book was ‘amazing in every way and so THRILLING’. As more and more readers find this story, I’m getting more lovely feedback and also lots of questions about the characters.
So here is a bit of background for some of the main ones. I won’t describe the physical appearance of the human characters – I know how they look in my head, but it’s how they look to you as the story plays like a film in YOUR head that counts! I want you to be able to imagine yourself inside any of them, the way I put myself inside Eowyn in Lord of the Rings, but here is a little background information to help you imagine my cast!
Toren Sisal
Toren is the mother of the three main human characters, Harlon, Ash and Xeno. At the time of the story she is still a relatively young woman, in her late thirties. She’s a little above average height I think, strong and athletic. Toren is the daughter of a retired military man and a beautiful heiress. She trained in the military herself as part of an elite force a bit like our SAS, but shortly after her training she ran away to join the eco-rebel forces fighting oil exploitation in the White Sea, my world’s equivalent of the Arctic. Toren is a warrior and gives the care of her first born daughter, Harlon, to her partner Tui, while she goes on to be a leader of a very successful and rather violent group of eco-activists, Green Thorn.
At the time of Tui’s death she is travelling back to rejoin and revitalise Green Thorn. But she discovers she is pregnant with twins and, to protect her children, she runs to the mountains to raise them in isolation giving herself a false name – Breen Avvon.
Toren isn’t naturally motherly to her three children, eldest daughter Harlon and younger twins, Ash a boy and Xeno a girl. But she tries. She loves her children with a deep, fierce passion; she cares for them, educates them, and prepares Harlon in particular to be a warrior, like her. When the time comes, something in Toren is relieved to return to the life of an activist and soldier, but this time without bloodshed… well, not much bloodshed. She does still shoot somebody in the head…
Harlon
At the start of the story, Harlon is in her mid-teens and has been raised by her mother to be a warrior, the protector of her younger siblings, Ash and Xeno. This has created a little separation between her and the twins.
Harlon’s sense of responsibility for them has made her a bit stiff and fierce at times. The fact that she doesn’t have the gift of Listening (the ability to tune in to the thoughts of animals) as they do, makes her feel very different from her siblings. Sometimes she feels she is the sensible one while they are both a bit dreamy, and sometimes she feels like the stupid one because she can’t do what they do.
Harlon is strong, fit, and well trained, but doubts her abilities at first, blaming herself for things that are beyond her control. But she is more like her mother than she realises: mentally tough and resilient. Yet there is something more to Harlon than that. She is Tui’s child too, and although she lacks his talent for Listening, she has his ability to connect in another way. The song he and his friends, the humpbacked whales, have planted inside Harlon’s brain is there waiting for the right moment. Harlon’s intelligence and bravery, her ability to analyse and then act, are ultimately what save the world.
Xeno
Xeno’s words pepper the story of The Song that Sings Us. She speaks in riddles but riddles that prove to have a deep meaning. Living in isolation on the mountain has allowed her family to get used to her strange, disconnected way of communicating and her eccentric behaviour. They come to accept the fact that Xeno is really more comfortable communing with birds than with humans.
But Xeno hasn’t really chosen to be this way. Her Listener power is the strongest of anyone in the story, stronger even than that of her father, Tui. So strong, in fact, that she cannot tune out the consciousness of birds. She connects with them automatically, like a radio tuned into multiple stations and perpetually on. Some of what flows into her mind she loves, but more often it leaves her overwhelmed, confused, and not really able to exert her own will or personality.
She seems vulnerable, fragile, and the character least able to take care of herself. Yet she is the one who engages most directly in conflict with the evil leader of the Automators, Doada Sisal. It is the making of her. She finds her will to resist him, and she finds a power that she thinks does not belong to her, but to the birds with whom she connects so powerfully. But she discovers at the end of the book that she is indeed powerful, and that she can be herself.
Ash
I’m often asked (or even sometimes told) which of the characters is most like me. Harlon and Toren are who I would like to be: warriors with the ability to think fast and make good decisions under pressure. Aspects of Xeno, her alienation from the world, and her struggle to make herself feel autonomous, are like me. But the human character who was easiest to write was Ash. He has a strong sense of fairness and looks at the world with clear eyes which sometimes find human behaviour strange or even ridiculous. He is the one who I used to make a commentary about some of the aspects of the Automators plans, which I find unacceptable in our world.
Ash loves his sister Xeno as if she were a part of himself. He looks up to Harlon and his mother and is afraid when his support system is taken away. But Ash is pretty flexible, and very resilient – he can adapt to hardship very easily and find something to make him happy in the simplest of things. He has a wry, sideways sense of humour, which he soon finds he shares with the Gula.
If you ask Ash at the start of the story, when he is about 12, where he would like to spend his life, he would say, ‘here on the mountain, of course’. He would never expect to end up on the mast of a ship sailing the oceans, and absolutely loving it. He is an unexpected adventurer, who lives in the moment.
Doada Sisal
Doada is desperate to conceal any information in case it undermines his rise to complete power in Rumyc. He was his mother’s darling son, spoiled by her. But he had inherited the Listener talent from his father’s side of the family, something his mother would disapprove of. Throughout his childhood he conceals this talent and through that grows a desire for secrecy and control and a taste for cruelty. He sees that his greatest chance of complete control, of complete power, lies through the Automators and their rise to power. So he must rid himself of the Listener power, which he does through a hideous self experiment.
Like his mother, Doada likes beautiful things, clothes, objects, and any kind of luxury. He sees them as his right. He’s good at manipulating people but has no real relationships in his life. No one would be good enough for him and anyone who got close might find out things he would be too ashamed to reveal. Doada is vain and deluded to the point of insanity. He is the only character who I would describe visually: he looks exactly like the UK politician Jacob Rees Mogg.
The Gula
The Gula is a wolverine, an animal with a bad reputation with humans for wanton destruction. But wolverines are just supreme survivors, incredibly tough and with a steely determination to get what they want. I did a lot of research about wolverines for another, non-fiction book, and unearthed lots of recent discoveries made through radio tagging. These studies in some ways reinforced the image of the wolverine as an indomitable survivor – one radio-tagged wolverine went straight up a 2000 foot vertical rock face in winter, in a blizzard, in the dark, because it was the shortest route to the next place it wanted to be. But they also showed that wolverines are not so solitary, that their bonds with their children are lifelong, reinforced by children visiting both mum and dad’s territories to hang out with them as adults.
The Gula’s vision of the trail came out of research too. Many indigenous hunters, when tracking animals using sight, sound, and smell cues, plus knowledge and memory, report the trail manifesting as a golden thread that they can actually see. It isn’t hard to imagine that an animal with such acute senses and high intelligence as a wolverine might experience something similar.
The Gula is wise, and intuitive. She trusts her senses, and what they tell her, and she trusts her brain’s ability to interpret that sensory information and give her an unshakeable direction in which to go. Having lost her own cubs, Ash becomes her cub substitute and she will never, ever give up on him. But in following Ash, she has experiences that no wolverine would normally have, and it makes her into something even more extraordinary.
Enkalamba
I find it incredibly moving that many people’s favourite character is Enkalamba and that her story arc moves many readers to tears. She is another character who grew out of research for other books, and from my own interest in elephants and in animal intelligence and consciousness.
Elephants, like humans, are social beings.They communicate with sound, smell, and touch, and form strong life-long bonds with family members and friends. They rely on each other and in particular on the matriarch of their group, who is the repository of knowledge. Her long life and long memory are the group’s insurance policy against drought and famine as the matriarch remembers where food and water can be found in a range of different seasons and conditions.
Studies of elephants show that they grieve over dead relatives and friends and even return to the place where a loved one died. So they are complex beings but their huge brains are arranged very differently from our own. Experiments have shown that they are very intelligent but the nature of that intelligence and the workings of their minds we can only guess at. Enkalamba finds human minds very different, and very difficult to navigate, but she is bright and very motivated to understand. Without any of her own kind left to take to she seeks communication with other beings and through that feels, ever more strongly, that all life is one kin. And I agree with her.
Skrimsli
Everyone’s favourite tiger sea captain! Skrimsli is a hero in a striped coat. His long associations – both very bad and very good – with humans have made him into a being not quite ‘tiger’, not quite ‘human’, but entirely himself.
I’m not going to say much about him here as I’m right in the middle of writing his backstory for the next book in the series. But he is based on a Siberian tiger, not a Bengal, so he’s a tiger whose ancestors hunted in the boreal forests of the north, and who is used to frosts and snow.
In writing about Skrimsli I’ve thought and read quite a bit about how language influences our thinking, on the sorts of thoughts and the sorts of communication that are only possible with language. Because language is what changes Skrimsli. I’m not sure what all his story is yet but you’ll be able to read about it soon.
Pick up a signed copy of The Song that Sings Us here! Pick up an unsigned copy here
Penny Thomas, Publisher at children’s and YA publisher Firefly Press has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights in Summer Under The Stars by author Kate Mallinder from Hannah Sheppard at DHH Literary Agency.
In the sequel to the much-loved Summer of No Regrets, the four friends drive across France in what should be the holiday of a lifetime.
But Sasha feels as if her dad’s wedding will be the end of her relationship with him; Cam is reeling from being rejected by her birth grandparents; Hetal is doing badly in school for the first time; and Nell’s in love and afraid she’ll lose Tom if she’s away too long.
They need to rekindle their friendship. They need a road trip to end all road trips. They need a summer under the stars.
‘This novel is a summer holiday in a book,’ said editor Janet Thomas. ‘I’m so delighted that we’re publishing this book. It’s full of Kate’s wise understanding of friendship. It’s a great read and an escape, and it’s also very wise, particularly on difficult families, first love and perfectionism. Readers are going to love it, and it’s such a joy to be working with Kate again.’
Kate Mallinder said: ‘I’m thrilled to continue working with the lovely Firefly team, and for the opportunity to write more adventures for Sasha, Hetal, Cam and Nell.’
The novel is slated for publication in Spring/Summer 2023.
Luīze Pastore is an award-winning Latvian author whose children’s novel, Dog Town, was published by Firefly in 2018. In this new blog she writes for Firefly readers about her horror at the war in Ukraine, and what it means for the children of Latvia, which was itself part of the USSR until 1991.
My name is Luīze Pastore. I am Latvian. In the last ten years I’ve been writing stories for Latvian children and most of them have our complicated history as the background to my plots. Mostly because it is simply impossible to avoid the history if you want to write a truthful story about anything in the Latvian past.
I was born in the USSR in 1986, and I was five years old when my father left our house to join other civilians in barricades in Riga to defend the dream of maintaining our free, sovereign country. He was there with his bare hands ready to face Soviet tanks. Latvia, which had just regained independence from the Soviet Union, anticipated that the Soviet Union would attempt to regain control over the country by armed force. It is probably only now that I fully comprehend the level of bravery that these people like my father had. Watching the Ukrainian civilians lying down in front of Russian tanks is heroism worth showing to my kids.
Here in Latvia our kids are waking up in a safe place. Our country has been a member of NATO since 2004 and we are reassuring our children that this means that we are “all for one, and one for all”. There is no fear that this promise would be lost. But I am very sure that every child in this country knows that the war is very close – just across two borders – and that it affects every single one in the world. Latvian children – Latvian speaking, Russian speaking, with Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian or Estonian backgrounds are joining their parents in peaceful protests, demonstrations and concerts, helping to pack humanitarian aid supplies to donate, showing all their support to Ukraine and admiring its level of bravery no one has seen before. It’s bravery has made Ukraine the “biggest” country in the world.
My children are five and three years old, and they know that soon there will be a Ukrainian family living in our house. They are packing their best toys to give away to children that might take a refuge under our roof. They are watching photos of newborn babies in the bomb shelters in Kiev. They do not get to watch war scenes, but they see rage, tears, sadness and determination in their parents’ eyes. They are slowly comprehending their privilege in being free – one thing no child in the world should busy their brains with.
I’ve been living in a free country since I was five and never imagined that the day when I should prepare my kids for 72-hour survival mode would come. I don’t want to live in the world where my children need to know how to pack a “72 hour survival bag” and how to safely evacuate to the basement of our house in the case of air strikes. I choose a world where my kids have terrible morning tantrums over a “wrong breakfast serving” instead of freezing in silence overhearing a daily dose of adult news in the radio. I want the same thing for the Ukrainian children – to have ordinary lives with ordinary happiness and ordinary failure.
There are a great many Russian-speaking families in Latvia that have different thoughts. People are overhearing small boys playing war games, shooting their wooden pistols in favour of the Russian side. This is the result of Russian media propaganda, the terrible lie bubble. Now that the propaganda media are finally banned and cut off in Latvia, people start to open their eyes. And it will not be easy times neither for them, nor for us because the integration of the Russian-speaking population for years and years has been a failure. Our children meet in the same kindergarten, though they never meet on the same ground. Luckily this is just one part of the Russian speaking population. The rest stand for Ukraine, for democracy, for European values.
We are not a particularly religious nation. We know that praying is not enough. But Latvians are famous for their ability to sing the enemy away. Peaceful protests may seem naïve, but they perform a significant role – they bring people from different backgrounds together in times when everything and everyone is trying to split them apart and set them against each other. The “evil president” – as my children call Putin – thrives on frightened and fragmented society; this is exactly why one of my tasks is to teach my children not to become russophobes.
They are still allowed to hate the “evil president”. Obviously.
#slavaukraine #westandwithukraine
Luīze Pastore is the author of ten children’s books, and has just won the New Horizons Bolognaragazzi Prize 2022, to be awarded at the Bologna Book Fair later this month. Her work has been translated into French, English and Estonian, and includes Dog Town (Firefly Press 2018) which was a Guardian pick and a Times Children’s Book of the Week. Luīze lives in Latvia with her young family and dog.
Award-winning children’s and YA publisher Firefly Press has launched a competition to find the best new stories for children and young adults, by writers from Wales.
Launched on St David’s Day, the competition hopes to discover new authors, writing for children. With three separate age groups to write for (age 7-9, 9-12 and 12-18), three winners will be selected by top children’s authors Catherine Fisher, Catherine Johnson and Malachy Doyle and Firefly Publisher Penny Thomas. The winner of each category will win a one-to-one editorial session with a Firefly editor and the overall winner will win a place on a Literature Wales’ Tŷ Newydd Writing Centre residential course in 2023 (subject to availability).
The competition is for a story written in English by writers either based in Wales or who have grown up in the country. Entry is free to ensure that it is accessible to as many writers as possible and Firefly actively welcomes entries by writers from underrepresented communities. The entry must be an original story, all the author’s own work, and the competition is open to published and unpublished writers.
Firefly Press is an independent children’s and YA publisher based in Wales, established in 2013. Firefly is the winner of the Wales Small Press of the Year British Book Awards (NIBBIES) 2020 and 2021, and currently shortlisted for 2022. We publish quality fiction for 5-19 years olds and authors include former Children’s Laureate Wales Eloise Williams, Horatio Clare, Catherine Fisher, Jennifer Killick, Luke Palmer and Nicola Davies among many others.
Firefly Publisher Penny Thomas said: ‘Firefly is keen to find the next generation of children’s writers from Wales, particularly from underrepresented communities. If you write, or want to write great stories for young people, we’d love to hear from you, so please be brave, go ahead and enter.’
Sarah Todd Taylor, winner of the first Firefly writing competition in 2013 said: ‘Winning the Firefly prize was the start of an exciting adventure in children’s publishing. It gave me confidence in my writing and the chance to have Arthur and Me published by an amazing team who were truly interested in the story and were so kind and supportive of me as a debut writer. It brought me the friendship of other Firefly authors too – it really is a very special publisher. There is nothing quite like the thrill of seeing a book in a shop with your name on the spine. Now I’m editing my sixth book, and it all began by pressing send on an entry to the Firefly prize. I’d encourage anyone who wants to write for children to enter this fantastic competition.’
Entries open from 1 March and close on 24 April. Winners will be announced in October 2022. For full information on how to enter please visit our dedicated page here.
