The Book of Hopes: Words and Pictures to Comfort, Inspire and Entertain Children in Lockdown

Completely free for all children and families, an extraordinary new collection of short stories, poems, essays and pictures has been created by author Katherine Rundell. 

It has contributions from more than 110 children’s writers and illustrators, including Lauren Child, Anthony Horowitz, Greg James and Chris Smith, Michael Morpurgo, Liz Pichon, Axel Scheffler, Francesca Simon and Jacqueline Wilson.

The stories and essays are designed to be dipped into and the stories and images aren’t explicitly about hope: rather, they aim to create it, through delight or comfort or new ideas, ridiculous jokes, wild heroic tales. There are doodles and flowers, revolting and beautiful poems, there are stories of space travel and new shoes and dragons. A world awaits…

The Book of Hopes is currently available to read online only. Read it here

The collection, published by Bloomsbury, is dedicated to the doctors, nurses, carers, porters, cleaners and everyone currently working in hospitals. Bloomsbury intends to publish a gift book based on the project in the autumn in support of NHS Charities Together later in the year. 

From Editor Katherine Rundell: 

“A few weeks ago, I began a Hope Project; I emailed some of the children’s writers and artists whose work I love most. I asked them to write something very short, fiction or non-fiction, or draw something that would make the children reading it feel like possibility-ists: something that would make them laugh or wonder or snort or smile. The response was magnificent, which shouldn’t have surprised me, because children’s writers and illustrators are professional hunters of hope. I hope that the imagination can be a place of shelter for children in the hard months ahead and that The Book of Hopes might be useful in that, even if only a little.”

Read the Book of Hopes online here

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