Bookbird 4 / 2018

The final Bookbird issue of 2018 contains a wealth of articles from all over the world, and it features very diverse approaches to children’s literature. Dipavali Debroy writes about “The Changing Treatment of Disability in Children’s Literature in India,” while Maryam Izadi analyses “The Portrayal of Animals in Two Iranian Picturebooks.” Further, we find articles on difficult topics, such as war, migration, displacement and home in, for instance, Åsa Warnqvist’s “Depictions of Flight From War in Contemporary Children’s and YA Books Published in Sweden,” and Geneviève Brisson’s and Theresa Rogers’s “Dis/ placed in Canada: A Québé­cois Graphic Novel in Transla­tion.” Culture and language is also at the forefront in Marija Todorova’s picturebook reading, “Into the Dark Woods: A Cross-Cultural Re-Imagi­nation of Home,” and in Beatrice Moja’s “Sociolinguistic Reflec­tions on Dickens’ A Holiday Romance (1868),” as well as in Emily Petermann’s analysis of caution­ary nonsense verse, “The Child’s Death as Punishment or Nonsense?” Finally, Luz Santa Maria offers up “Clashes of Modernity in Chilean Contemporary Young Adult Novels.” Besides the feature articles, we find texts on the Irish author PJ Lynch, a teaching unit on Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, and a longer text on “Creating Nations from Silent Books.” Then there are postcards, of course, and Focus IBBY, with news from the wide world of IBBY. The beautiful cover is from the Yi-Ching Su’s Letter “A Symphony of Poems and Pictures: Hwa-Jen Ho’s Nonfiction Picturebooks about Wild Birds in Taiwan.” Those words deserve to be repeated, I believe, and applied to this Bookbird, for it is a veritable Symphony of words and pictures! Enjoy!

Björn Sundmark

Editor