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Bologna Book Fair 2017

Flanders Literature's team will be present at the Bologna Children's Book Fair (3-6 April). You’ll find our grants managers Elise and Lien in hall 29, stand D40, talking to foreign publishers about the very best Flemish authors and illustrators and providing information about funding opportunities for books in translation. This is our selection of recent quality children's and YA literature from Flanders. Please contact us for an appointment if you like what you see. We’d love to meet you.


  • Cover Cherry Heaven
    Cover Cherry Heaven
    Cherry Blossom and Paper Planes
    Aerts has the ability to make emotions glow beneath his words.
    Kinderboekenpraatjes

    Some friends are much more than that. They grow up like twin cherries on the same stalk. Adin and Dina have that kind of friendship. ‘Cherry Heaven’ is a sensitive story about going away and coming back, and about the power of friendship: in spite of Adin’s move to the city, the two children do whatever they can to stay connected.

  • Cover Tomorrow Is Another Country
    Cover Tomorrow Is Another Country
    Tomorrow Is Another Country
    Impactful. Shows shameful current realities that get deep under the skin.
    De Morgen

    A girl is hiding in the back of a lorry. She’s sharing the space with a horse, her mum, and Captain Compass, her best friend. They’re on their way to another country, where the walls don’t dance and the houses don’t fall, and where the sky doesn’t rumble like thunder when there’s not a cloud to be seen. A light book about a weighty subject.

  • Cover Grimly Good
    Cover Grimly Good

    Following the adaptation and sanitisation of fairy stories by the Brothers Grimm, Disney and others, writers are increasingly restoring these tales to their original, complex and sometimes dark and creepy forms. Marita de Sterck is the unbeatable master.

  • Cover - Magritte's Apple
    Cover - Magritte's Apple
    Magritte’s Apple
    Beautifully crafted
    Kid’s Book Review

    This absurd picture book is a successful introduction to the richly nuanced oeuvre of René Magritte, which at the same time invites one to explore further. Verplancke shows himself a born surrealist.

  • Cover Gibbe en de maandagman
    Cover Gibbe en de maandagman
    Gibbe and the Monday Man
    The first real Dutch-language equivalent of the Treehouse Books
    NRC Handelsblad

    Gibbe wakes up one morning in the park, with no idea how he got there. Then he meets the Monday man (‘I’m the one who takes you safely to Tuesday’). This book is built on irony and absurdity and defies all the rules of children’s books. Completely crazy, it maintains its ironic style throughout.

  • Cover Stella ster van de zee
    Cover Stella ster van de zee
    Stella
    The atmospheric, bitter-sweet illustrations make the sadness palpable and yet palatable.
    De Morgen

    'Stella. Star of the Sea' is a tale about loneliness, being different and searching for your place in the world. It is also a story about the boundless nature of parental love and about letting your children go so that they can be themselves. When writing this story, Dendooven was inspired by disturbing photos of refugees and by the horrors experienced by children in war zones.

  • Cover - Witchfairy
    Cover - Witchfairy

    Rosemary thinks fairies are terribly boring. And the worst of it is that she’s a fairy herself. She would rather be a witch.
    To celebrate his twentieth anniversary as an illustrator, Carll Cneut has created new illustrations for this popular picture book.

  • Cover - I must
    Cover - I must

    ‘I Must’ is a collection of powerful portraits and philosophical texts full of compassion, vulnerable and confrontational at the same time. It exposes a merciless and terrible human tangle of obligations and expectations. Godon and Tellegen inspire thoughts, give a name to feeling and trigger involvement.

  • Cover Heaven
    Cover Heaven

    In this gem of a story, Bart Moeyaert writes with surprising lightness about loneliness and dying. Gerda Dendooven’s robust green-and-black drawings capture the tenderness of death and the strangeness of this imminent demise.

  • Cover Hertz
    Cover Hertz
    Hertz
    A layered book about a voyage of discovery
    Jaap Friso

    Norway, a sleepy fishing village at the beginning of the 20th century. Finn tries to contact his father, out at sea. Against the background of a village that is being forced into modernisation and the inhumanity that sometimes accompanies it, a story of sadness and indefinable longing unfolds, which also smoothly incorporates gripping scenes.

  • Cover Crossing the Line
    White Raven 2017
    Cover Crossing the Line
    White Raven 2017
    Crossing the Line
    Aline Sax shows how the damage inflicted by the wall carries on beyond its physical destruction.
    MappaLibri

    Three generations of Berliners, one wall. In ‘Crossing the Line’, Aline Sax has written an epic tale of life with the Berlin Wall. This tense sketch of a family’s struggle for survival presents daily life in Berlin in a fascinating and convincing light. The threat of the Stasi gradually permeates, and the feeling that no one can be trusted continues to reverberate throughout.

  • Cover Babel
    Cover Babel
    Babel
    An ambitious young adult novel about the things that divide us: money and religion
    Trouw

    Babel is an exciting, profound novel, in which Jan De Leeuw again shows that his great strength lies in creating complex, thoroughly credible characters. In this flawlessly constructed story the puzzle is slowly laid out and no one turns out to be what they seem. Apparently effortlessly De Leeuw embeds the human struggle of his characters in a web of religion and superstition, Biblical and jihadi themes.