John McIntyre from The Children’s Bookshop in Wellington is a top children’s bookseller. He’s here once a month to answer your child-related reading questions. Dear John, My four-year-old son is obsessed with trains, and if I have to read another…
Never be stuck for something to do! Keep your hands and brain busy with glue, tape and scissors – and have crafty fun with Fifi! An adult Greek tortoise, like Torty, is around 20cm long. But you can make a…
Multi award-winning US slam poet Anis Mojgani writes about the things which captivate us as children, the magic and promise books hold, and how it is to grow up in a New Orleans children’s bookshop. The pages of my childhood…
Every two weeks we compile, for your browsing pleasure, cool children’s book happenings (and peripherally related news) from around Aotearoa, the world and the internet. Given we are all about adult conversations about children’s literature, it’s probably not too surprising…
In the first of our monthly comics by Giselle Clarkson, we learn the great, early influence Raymond Briggs had on our illustrator.
For International Women’s Day, an essay by Nina Powles about Hermione Granger, feminism and searching for yourself in books. My room at the house near the beach was small and blue. It was empty except for a fold-out bed and…
Kyle Mewburn tells us why our children’s writers are so special, and opens a discussion about why New Zealand should appoint a Children’s Laureate. If your orbit has intersected with the local children’s literature scene over the last few years,…
Marmaduke Duck creator, Juliette MacIver explains how she’s managed to write such a vast number of excellent rhyming picture books, so we all might follow suit.
Miriama Kamo is one of New Zealand’s foremost broadcasters. She looks back on her book-loving childhood, and that time she tried to get Witi Ihimaera to adopt her. It was a watershed, Pounamu, Pounamu: the book that was the growing…
Kate De Goldi confesses the pleasures of reading ‘off-task and off-curriculum’, and describes how necessary public libraries are to the development of a love of reading. In my late teens and early twenties I worked as a library assistant in…