I have been Laureate na nÓg, the ambassador for literature for children and young people on the island of Ireland, since May 2023. This is an honour given to a children’s author or illustrator but, to me, it feels like an honour that’s given to the whole sector.
What I like most about my role is that our country recognises children’s writers and illustrators are important, and that children’s literature is essential. Our love for stories is one that so often starts in childhood and lasts for a lifetime. It has formed our literary legacy and inspired generations of creatives across the island.
People often ask me when I’ll write a proper book. The question comes from the mistaken notion that children’s books are merely a stepping stone to writing ‘real’ books – books for adults. In fact, they are the portal through which children access culture and learn to think about the world.
Books help children to reimagine the world, to see how it could be changed. Think of all the stories for children where the weak and marginalised triumph, where the loudest, strongest voices don’t prevail, where people can grow and develop.
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There is so much joy to be found in the world of children’s books. However, it’s all too often diminished as a lesser art or not taken as seriously as books written for an adult audience. In fact, a children’s author has a huge responsibility.
During my first few months of Laureate na nÓg the reading crisis was becoming more apparent on a global scale
Our voice is often the last adult voice that a teenager will actively listen to. Our voice is often the one that lulls a baby to sleep. We have the unique privilege of speaking directly to them, whispering into their ear as they turn the pages at the end of a long day, showing them themselves and others navigating this often-difficult world and giving them hope that others have travelled the same path and survived.
During my first few months of Laureate na nÓg the reading crisis was becoming more apparent on a global scale. Recent studies from Children’s Books Ireland have shown the plummeting rates of book ownership in our young people, with 24 per cent of Irish teenagers (aged 13–18) and 19 per cent of boys across all age categories reportedly not reading for pleasure.
In a world with so much technology and very little time, these results are shocking but unsurprising. I thought about how, when things go wrong in a subject in schools, they bring in a specialist. At the forefront of my mind was the question: “How can we help our young people to engage with reading?”
And so, I wanted to bring the specialists, our wonderful Irish authors and illustrators, straight to the audiences they were writing for – children and teenagers who were living in small towns, rural communities and attending more remote schools. My flagship project for my term as Laureate began in April 2024 with the Whole Wild World bus tour, a two-week cultural roadshow that spanned 1,400km, visiting a spate of schools, bookshops, libraries and cultural venues from Malin Head to Mizen Head. We had 36 artists who came and went from the bus, sharing their ideas, delivering workshops and fostering a love of reading in the children they met.
Over the course of this journey, we met 3,000 children, we met parents, guardians and teachers, librarians and booksellers. We gave away 2,000 brand new books to young readers and held several events in English and in Irish. We performed to up to 300 children in theatres along the coast. In a school in Glentiesn we played to the entire school population – nine children.
Just a fortnight ago, we repeated the same idea around Northern Ireland, stopping off in Belfast, Derry, Bellaghy, Ballymena and many more places. As an all-island children’s Laureate, I was delighted to embark on this week-long bus tour meeting 2,400 lively children, their teachers, librarians and booksellers. Once again, I was joined by a host of children’s artists, many of them Northern Irish, such as Máire Zepf, Clive McFarland and Flora Delargy. During the trip, we played to 350 children in the Guildhall in Derry and, with Eoin Colfer and Oliver Jeffers, spent a morning with all 10 children who attended St Mary’s School on beautiful Rathlin Island.
All children and young people deserve to experience exciting and memorable journeys with children’s books. By meeting and hearing from local authors and illustrators, they can feel inspired to pick up a book or indeed a paintbrush and let their imaginations run wild.
My theme as Laureate na nÓg is Making It Up As We Go Along. To mark the centrepiece of my tenure, I wrote a fun, practical guide designed to ignite and encourage the creativity of readers aged eight to 12.
Making It Up As You Go Along: A Children’s Guide to Writing Stories was published by Little Island last October. It contains all of my best advice when it comes to creating characters or structuring plot and is a book that encourages young people to read, to write and to reach their full potential as creative beings. As well as wonderful illustrations by Mary Murphy, it also features letters to the reader penned by some of the country’s most beloved children’s authors and illustrators, including Derek Landy, Siobhán Parkinson and Catherine Doyle, among others.
My vision and indeed my hope for the next generation is that they will make it up as they go along and delight themselves and others with their imaginings. I’d like to see them all reading and writing regardless of where they are in our society. All our children deserve access to books and imagination, whether they are in housing estates, on halting sites, on farms, in small towns and big cities, or in direct provision.
However, we are in competition with the most effective, addictive tool ever invented, namely social media and the internet. Books are as clever as social media, as addictive, as gripping. Most teens today, however, are on their phones for up to five hours a day while babies are introduced to a screen as young as six months. Tech companies are stealing our children’s attention, our children’s time and ultimately our children’s childhoods.
We must meet young people where they are, in schools and at events. We must make sure every school has a library, where there are modern and inclusive books that represent the student population and bring readers back to the bookshelves. When children learn to read for pleasure, their reading is not confined to the page.
Children’s books are not a frippery, not a toy to be chosen without much thought. They are fundamental. They build the adults of the future
They learn to read the world, they learn about the psychology of people, they learn history and see how it repeats, they learn empathy. In short, they learn to think for themselves. They will be harder to lie to, harder to manipulate, harder to indoctrinate.
Books and stories have passed safely from one generation to the next for thousands of years. They contain the best of us – our wisdom, our humour, all that we have learnt. What if we were the last generation to read? What if we were the generation that dropped the baton?
I could not endure a world without books – a world where I couldn’t read. It is amazing to discover yourself, or a kindred spirit, between the pages of a book. And how much more powerful is that feeling when the reader is a child.
What can we as adults do to help create life-long readers?
We can read to them and let them see us reading. We can take them to live events with authors and illustrators. We can encourage them to read all books with pleasure and Irish ones with an added sense of pride. We can share books as Gaeilge with them. We can control their use of screens and our own use of screens. We can imagine a different world for them.
Children’s books are not a frippery, not a toy to be chosen without much thought. They are fundamental. They build the adults of the future and shape the society of the future. And they bring us joy because children’s books insist that joy is possible. The joy of eating Turkish Delight in a snow-covered world, the joy of going on an adventure with a hobbit or sailing out to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat.
As I finish my term as Laureate na nÓg, I wish all of our children continued adventures in the world of story and unhindered access to the books that can take them there.
