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Picturing a World

Tree and River

Congratulations to Aaron Becker! His wordless picture book, The Tree and the River, is the 2024 double winner of England's prestigious Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration (awarded by an expert panel of librarians) and the Yoto Carnegie Shadowers Choice Medal for Illustration, which is decided by children and library users. It's one of those picture books in which the more you look, the more you see. In double-page spread after double-page spread, it depicts the colonization of a beautiful valley, its gradual transformation to village to town to city to ruin to—well, you'll have to get hold of the book to find out!


 
You'd think as a writer, I'd prefer books with text, but actually I'm a big fan of wordless books, which can be hugely imaginative, beautiful, informative, or all three. Among the favorites on my shelf are John Goodall's Story of a Farm (1989), David Wiesner's Tuesday (1991), Shaun Tan's Arrival (2006), and Becker's own Journey (2013).
 
For Wiesner's excellent history of the form, click here. The website, Wordless Books, also has a superb collection of examples—I've already requested Jeannie Baker's Window through Interlibrary Loan!

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