FRENCH FRIDAY: South Ken Kids Festival

On Monday begins a week long celebration of children’s books brought to you by the Institut français in London.
This year’s edition features more than 40 public events including workshops, talks, films, live
music, theatre, book signings with no less than 25 writers and illustrators.
The Festival will also take part in the 50th anniversary celebrations of leading French publisher, l’École des loisirs, home to many of the most-loved French authors and illustrators, and a few of them such Claude Ponti and Marie-Aude Murail will make the trip to London to help with the celebrations.
For more information about the festival and how to book tickets on some of those wonderful events, visit the festival’s website.

I wish I was closer to London so I could go to the festival as many of my favourite French authors and illustrators will be present , including one of our most talented and prolific children’s fiction authors, Marie-Aude Murail, whose incredible body of work has won her over 75 books prizes, including 27 for Oh Boy! alone (source Wikipedia). She is an outstanding writer though unfortunately only her book Simple, published has been translated and published here, under the title My Brother Simple (you can read my review here). Not so long ago I read Trois mille façons de dire je t’aime, an ode to our most cherished classic French plays and my favourite remains Miss Charity, a mammoth saga loosely inspired by Beatrix Potter’s life and assumption illustrated by Philippe Dumas. You can’t really miss Potter’s influence here:

Adapting classics to a child audience was the subject of Murail’s thesis, which is fascinating considering the premise of Miss Charity. She as already written about Charles Dickens and this whom she will be talking about during her event in London on Saturday 21st November.
The illustration below is from an adaptation Murail has made of Great Expectations, also illustrated by Philippe Dumas