Monday, October 27, 2008

Graeme Base Interview

Look how pretty!

Ahem. I mean. I want that picture of the lions for my wall.

Go read this interview with author/illustrator Graeme Base, from the Sydney Morning Herald. Although he's based in Australia, a lot of his work has made its way across the pond and into your local library.

He has strong words for publishers who want to dumb down his vocabulary or obvious-ize some of the more subtle elements. Something he's (sigh) right about:
"Maybe I will be brave enough to say this: the problem is more evident in America, where there's the need, it seems to me, to spoonfeed," Base says. "You can't leave something slightly ambiguous or not show the solution ... they needed explanation for something where my inclination was to not explain but to ask the reader to work it out or to slowly realise there's something else going on here."

1 comment:

*m* said...

i've seen this picture before! where? i think it was in a book i read when i was a kid? oooh, this is going to drive me nuts!