Calling all Young Illustrators from Frome and beyond!

Enter Frome’s first Young Illustrators competition.
Create a cover for your favourite book about a QUEST or a JOURNEY.

Age Categories:
Under 7 / 7-10 / 11-13 / 14-18

You can pick up competition flyers around Frome at Hunting Raven Bookshop,
Frome Library and Rook Lane Arts.

Or you can download your Young Illustrator Competition
flyer and entry form by clicking the link below.

http://www.break3.org.uk/2013/05/young-illustrator-competition-flyer/

deadline for entries Monday 3rd June

Short-listed entries will be displayed at Rook Lane Arts alongside the summer exhibition of literary illustration ‘Out of the Silence’

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Featuring artworks by contemporary illustrators including Jackie Morris, Jessica Ahlberg, Nadine Wickenden and Sholto Walker, this exhibition will ignite the imagination and celebrate the transformative effect of a great story. The title, Out of the Silence, was inspired by the first lines of  Jackie Morris’ book, the Snow Leopard.

Alongside the main exhibition, Break 3 Words will be showcasing the shortlisted entries to the Young Illustrators book-cover competition for children and young people. This will take place in the café at Rook Lane Arts, with prizes awarded to the winning entries at the exhibition’s launch, during the Frome Festival.

Tim Goodall and Rachel Button signing copies of the new updated edition of The Buildings of Frome

On Saturday 20 April we were delighted to welcome Tim Goodall and Rachel Button who came to attend the launch of the third updated edition of their father Rodney Goodall’s book The Buildings of Frome. The book has just been published by The Frome Society for Local Study, with many new photographs. This book is essential reading for those interested, or curious, about Frome’s buildings, and the historical growth and development of the town.

Mr Goodall also wrote a companion book called The Industries of Frome where he describes in great detail the growth and decline of the woollen industry and related trades of dyeing and carding and how these were superseded by metal foundries, printing, brewing, vat making, building construction and later rubber, plastics and paint.

Rodney Goodall loved Frome. In 1963, as a young architect in his late twenties, he came to the town and settled here, becoming mayor in 1977. He helped save the Trinity area and Rook Lane Chapel. The father-of-two passed away in 2011 aged 76.  If you wish to learn about Frome’s buildings, or the growth of the town, this book is a mine of information.

Copies of The Buildings of Frome and The Industries of Frome are available at Hunting Raven Books.

Authors and Books for Children Day
on THURSDAY 14 MARCH 2013
was the most amazing day!

This year’s ABCDay has been the most successful yet! We are thrilled to report that almost 500 young book-lovers
attended the author sessions & feedback from schools has been brilliant!

ALL TICKETS SOLD OUT AND EXTRA SESSIONS WERE PUT ON TO MEET DEMAND!

MORE pictures will follow soon – so watch this space!

……………………………………………………………………………….

THE ABC Day 2013 AUTHORS and ILLUSTRATORS
……………………………………………………………………………….

JESSICA AHLBERG

Daughter of the amazing, popular and much-loved Allan and Janet Ahlberg! She’s the baby in Peepo!! Inspired by her parents, Jessica is striding into the world of children’s books with great successes such as Half a Pig, Letters to Anyone and Everyone and most recently Yucky Worms and a new version of Goldilocks!

Goldilocks Lift the flaps and pull the tabs to join Goldilocks in a hilarious series of adventures, as award-winning storyteller Allan Ahlberg. Illustrated by his daughter, Jessica, together they put their own stamp on a timeless tale.

Yucky Worms Worms…they’re yucky, aren’t they? Not according to this enjoyable new book which reveals just how amazing the wriggly creatures really are! Worms – fun, fascinating and wriggly worms!

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

JACKIE MORRIS

Jackie knew from at least the age of six that she wanted to be an artist. She watched her dad drawing a picture of a lapwing, making a bird appear on a piece of paper using only a pencil, and she thought it was some magic that made this happen. She likes the colour blue, cats, listening to music, reading and wished that she had a grandfather clock with a BIG key to wind it up. www.jackiemorris.co.uk

I am Cat A cat sleeps, curled up in a warm place, and while it sleeps it dreams…of being a tiger, flame cat of the forest; a cheetah … 10 wild habitats, 10 wild cats and one domestic cat are dramatically and beautifully illustrated in this unique celebration of the cat.

Tell Me a Dragon Everyone has their very own dragon, and this book describes many different varieties of the beast, showing in words and stunning pictures exactly why their owners find them so entrancing. They range from a dragon as big as a village to a tiny dragon with whisper-thin wings, from a snaggle-toothed dragon to a sea-dragon which races dolphins on the waves – ending in a page inhabited by every dragon in the book!

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

SAM GAYTON

Young writer Sam enjoys reading … especially books about tiny people! He also enjoys playing Kubb in the park with his friends, being part of a theatre company and cooking – although he isn’t always very good at it! www.samgayton.com

The Snow Merchant Lettie Peppercorn lives in a house on stilts near the wind-swept coast of Albion. Nothing incredible has ever happened to her, until one winter’s night. The night the Snow Merchant comes …

Lilliput Inspired by “Gulliver’s Travels”, “Lilliput” is an exhilarating adventure filled with cunning escape plans, evil clockmakers and very talkative parrots. Join Lily as she travels over rooftops, down chimneys and into chocolate shops on a journey to find the one place in the world where she belongs…Home.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

MAUDIE SMITH

Maudie lives with her family near Bath. She has always been ‘a bit of a writer’, and has pretty much been writing stories ever since her first teacher gave her a big RED exercise book when she was five years old. She loves chocolate and pizza (not together), playing tennis and singing in the bath!! www.maudiesmith.co.uk

Opal Moonbaby Martha’s decided friends are stupid. Especially if they’re anything like Colette and Chloe. She never wants another friend. Ever. But it’s the first day of the summer holidays, and there’s not that much to do…until she spots a strange little furry creature who leads her to Opal Moonbaby.

About Zooming Time, Opal Moonbaby! Opal Moonbaby is spending a year on Earth. A whole year! Martha can’t wait to take her to school, to introduce her to her friends and to recreate all the fun they had during the summer. But things don’t turn out quite as expected!

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

GILL LEWIS

When Gill was small she wanted to be an explorer or work with animals – she became a vet before she became a writer! She cares madly about the natural world, its creatures and environments. She loves to eat cheese and pickle sandwiches when she’s writing and as a great daydreamer she thinks everyone needs to daydream – some of the time! www.gilllewis.com

Sky Hawk When Callum and his friends find Iona on Callum’s farm they try to chase her back into the village. But Iona runs from them up into the hills. It is late and dark and snow lies in the mountain gullies.
Callum follows and discovers that she is guarding a secret hidden in the forest above the dark waters of the loch … so they make a deal.

White Dolphin When they first meet, Kara and Felix can’t stand each other. On discovering an injured dolphin calf on the beach they know they must work together to save it. But powerful people don’t want them to succeed. With the odds stacked against them, how can Kara and Felix make their voices heard?

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

]]> http://www.huntingravenbooks.co.uk/2013/04/06/authors-and-books-for-children-day-2013/feed/ 0 http://www.huntingravenbooks.co.uk/2013/03/25/featured-in-vogue/ http://www.huntingravenbooks.co.uk/2013/03/25/featured-in-vogue/#comments Sun, 24 Mar 2013 23:43:30 +0000 admin http://www.huntingravenbooks.co.uk/?p=3673

In the 21^st century, it’s fairly easy to take for granted that the female of the species has it in her to become a professional painter. Not so in 1896 when the 20-year-old Paula Becker left her parents’ home in Bremen, north Germany to learn drawing and painting at a Berlin art school. Three years later, she settled in Worpswede, the centre of a north German artist colony, studying under the landscape and peasant painter Fritz Mackensen.  Modersohn-Becker’s story is intriguing and impressive on a number of counts. Not only did she become a professional artist in a time when the place of a middle-class woman was at the side of her husband in the home. She was amongst the first in Germany to grasp the revolutionary significance of the Paris avant-garde. But despite decades of feminist art history and the increasingly strong role of women in today’s art world, this precursor of German Expressionism has remained in the shadows, at least in the English-speaking world.

Poet and art critic Sue Hubbard has brought her story to a wider public in Girl in White, drawing strongly on paintings, drawings and the artist’s diaries and correspondence. In search of inspiration and the thrill of a modern metropolis as opposed to German provincialism, the aspiring artist travelled from Worpswede to Paris five times in seven years. These journeys, her family, the people she meets, her relationship with Otto Modersohn, whom she eventually marries, and above all, the struggle to develop artistic form are vividly evoked.

Via the fictionalised first-person voice of her only child, Mathilde, as a historical counterpoint, Hubbard swings backwards and forwards in time, from the turn of the century as Modersohn-Becker reaches maturity, to the rise of Fascism and Mathilde’s love affair with a Jewish musician. Hubbard conjures up Modersohn-Becker as a living, breathing woman, struggling against the might of established views. She had encouragement and financial support from a sympathetic father and her husband. But there were limits to even their tolerance, as she takes the rocky road to becoming an independent artist.  The highs and lows of the artist’s relationships with fellow rebel and close friend, sculptor Clara Westhoff, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and husband Otto place her at the heart of the artistic milieu in Worpswede.

She had only six years to work as a professional artist. She died in 1907, aged 31, after giving birth to Mathilde. She missed by just two years the German avant-garde’s Sonderbund, which held landmark exhibitions challenging the reactionary bastions of imperial Germany.  Detailed descriptions of the downtrodden women and men of the northern moors, the flat landscape mirroring the artist’s moods, the ups and downs of her friendships, keep the story going in a breathless naïve way. Her dedication and love of life leave the reader unprepared for the shocking sense of bereavement at the end of the book.

Girl in White is published by Cinnamon Press. £8.99

Review of Girl in White from Critics Circle website – http://www.criticscircle.org.uk/?ID=302&PID=1

Check out this postmark!!

Sean Magee meeting Hunting Raven customers

Desert Island Discs:  70 Years of Castaways by Sean Magee

“Desert Island Discs” is much more than a radio programme. It is a unique and enduringly popular take on our lives and times – and this extensively illustrated book by Sean Magee tells in rich detail the colourful and absorbing story of an extraordinary institution.

For seventy years now “Desert Island Discs” has managed that rare feat – to be both enduring and relevant. By casting away the biggest names of the day in science, business, politics, showbiz, sport and the arts, it presents a cross-sectional snapshot of the times in which we live. As the decades have passed, the programme has kept pace; never frozen in time yet always, somehow, comfortingly the same. (Kirsty Young, BBC Radio 4).

“Desert Island Discs” celebrated its seventieth birthday in 2012. Since the programme’s deviser Roy Plomley interviewed comedian Vic Oliver in January 1942, nearly 3,000 distinguished people from all walks of life have been stranded on the mythical island, accompanied by only eight records, one book and a luxury.  Here the story of one of BBC Radio 4′s favourite programmes is chronicled through a special selection of castaways. Roy Plomley, inventor of the programme as well as its presenter for over forty years, quizzes the young Cliff Richard about ‘these rather frenzied movements’ the 1960s pop sensation makes on the stage. Robert Maxwell tells Plomley’s successor Michael Parkinson that ‘I will have left the world a slightly better place by having lived in it.’ Diana Mosley assures Sue Lawley that Adolf Hitler was ‘extraordinarily fascinating’ and had mesmeric blue eyes.Johnny Vegas tugs Kirsty Young’s heart-strings with his account of a childhood so impoverished that family pets were fair game: ‘My dad had always claimed that rabbits were livestock, but we’d never eaten one before.’ A real snapshot of history!

For the book Sean has also talked to the presenters after Roy Plomley: not just to Kirsty Young, but to Sue Lawley and Michael Parkinson who have both been cast away themselves too. A book not to be missed in the run up to Christmas…

“Desert Island Discs” is now available at Hunting Raven Books – the perfect Christmas gift!!

Packed with useful nuggets of advice; Dave Hamilton’s book has everything you need to kick start a more self-sufficient way of life. GROW YOUR FOOD FOR FREE (Well, Almost) is all about gardening without spending money. Rather than dealing too much with actual gardening advice, which after all you can get from pretty much any book, the watchwords here are reusing and recycling. Whether it’s planting a wildlife corner or making a tunnel cloche out of – well, nothing much, really – this book points you firmly away from the shops. It directs you instead to take a good look at what you’ve already got, or what other people are giving away for free.

Ellie Mains’ artwork, following the primitive style much used by the Transition network, makes clear that this is a twenty-first century book. This echoes the book’s anti-consumerist philosophy, which is made apparent right from the start, including in the opening paragraphs. Hamilton is, without doubt, a writer who wears his heart on his homespun sleeve.

Aimed squarely at urban gardeners, the book concentrates on advice for the small scale. The scope, on the other hand, is wide. The growing of food is a large and varied subject, and a single volume can do no more than provide an overview of each. This is what Grow Your Food for Free does very effectively, punctuated with detailed practical advice picked out in coloured boxes to separate it from the text. 
(Taken from book review by Andy McKee – The Ecologist)

Find out more about Dave Hamilton by clicking on: Five minutes with Dave Hamilton