I find the younger you are, the simpler it is to grasp the concept. Isn't the subject too dark or complex for kids? ( You can listen to the interview with CBC’s Labrador morning here.) My daughter Nicola, a Trinity College undergraduate who's studying Cinema Studies and English, travelled with me and shot the documentary below. It was a great privilege to share the book with them and to see the stories and drawings they created in response. It’s a fantastic national program that sends authors, illustrators and storytellers across the country every year to share stories and art with kids, parents and teachers in schools and libraries. I also recently returned from travelling through Labrador on behalf of the Canadian Children’s Book Centre and the Canada Council for the Arts, as part of the TD Canada Children’s Book Week. Most students have heard a great deal about raising money or awareness to fight diseases or build wells or schools in impoverished countries but they have heard little about human rights and or freedom of expression They cannot believe how many journalists have been killed in Mexico. They are appalled to learn that Nobel laureate Liu Xiabo, is still serving time in prison for writing seven sentences. They are fascinated to learn about all the groups that work to protect writers, journalists, bloggers around the world. It works well with students from about age eight to 18. I’ve taken the book into libraries and classrooms for writing workshops and presentations, and I talk a lot about PEN and freedom of expression. Some of the proceeds go to PEN Canada – are you also using the book to raise awareness for PEN? I left that meeting and spent the next three days writing The Stamp Collector. So was the notion that a sympathetic guard might be moved to treat a prisoner less harshly once he realized the prisoner was a writer. The idea that stamps from other countries could tell a story without words was powerful. Someone asked: then why write? And Weiping replied: because the guards collect stamps. He told us that we should write to the imprisoned writers but we should know that the letters would never make it to them – only the guards would see them. Weiping told us that, in a Chinese prison, the guards are given no information about prisoners or their crimes the prisoners might be thieves or murderers or poets. He had just been released from prison where he was sent for a series of investigative articles describing the activities of Bo Xilai, then a very powerful government official. The exiled Chinese writer Jiang Weiping at the offices of PEN Canada in 2009. It’s an unusual subject for a picture book but the inspiration came from a very real encounter I had with How did you come to write The Stamp Collector? U of T News spoke with Lanthier about the book. In April, Lanthier received the Ezra Jack Keats Emerging Writer Honour Award from the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation for The Stamp Collector and in June she received the Huguenot Society Award from the Ontario Historical Society, honouring the best book or substantial article published in Ontario in the past three years which has brought public awareness to the principles of freedom of conscience and freedom of thought. And it won the Crystal Kite Award for best children’s book published in the Americas in 2012 from the SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators). It was a finalist for the LIBRIS awards of the Canadian Booksellers Association and for the Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Illustrator’s Award of the Canadian Library Association. The United States Board on Books for Young People has named it an Outstanding International Book and the International Reading Association named it a Notable Book for a Global Society. Written by U of T News Editor and University College alumna Jennifer Lanthier with illustrations by Francois Thisdale, The Stamp Collector was published by Fitzhenry and Whiteside in October 2012 in Canada and the United States. They meet as teens when the stamp collector leaves school to take a job as a prison guard and the storyteller is sent to prison for writing a short story. The Stamp Collector is a picture book about a boy who collects stories and a boy who collects stamps.
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