Fairgoers tour the Golden Pinwheel exhibition, showing winning artwork in the 2024 China Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair. Image: CCBF
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
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Acclaimed, Sophisticated Illustration Work
While the China Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair has benefited from its collaboration with its six-year (of 10) collaboration with Elena Pasoli‘s Bologna Children’s Book Fair (BCBF, March 31 to April 3) and Jacks Thomas‘ Bologna Book Plus in many ways, one of the key elements being a fine understanding of how much a trade show can do to support illustrators and the importance of their work in the international book trade, especially, of course, in young people’s literature.
This year’s competition in September released its finalists for what then becomes a “people’s choice” program, with the public asked to choose their favorites from a field of 66 pieces, 50 of those in the “book publishing category” and 16 in the “commercial” category.
Those finalists this year have represented 19 countries and territories on six continents. Based in younger applicants, the youngest finalist-illustrators were 22 years old.
The jurors were Yukiko Hiromatsu (Japan); Jon Klassen (USA); Morgane Vasta (France); Xiao Aozi (China); and Yao Hong (China) for the book-publishing classification. Jurors Hadi Barkat (Switzerland); Giacomo Benelli (Italy); and the singled-named “Tango” (China) handled the commercial imagery entries. Together, they reviewed 2,584 entries “using a shared online system and finalized their selections via digital conference.
What we’ll do here is give you a taste from each of the two categories and then direct you to the Golden Pinwheel pages online for you to learn and see more if you’re interested.
In the commercial category, for example, a couple of entertaining winners are from a series that might remind you a bit of its inspiration, Where’s Waldo” y Martin Handford. The Morganti series of illustrations include the “Crispy McBacon” series, from the 33-year-0ld Italian illustrator Daniele Morganti was created for McDonalds Italy, and features Crispy McBacon: Library, Crispy McBacon: Museum, and others.
Here’s a look at one of these works, and you can find them all here.
From the ‘Crispy McBacon’ illustration work by Daniele Morganti. Image: CCBF
And from Parvin Heydarizadli in Iran, An Ominous Shadow on the Wheat Field is, as the artist writes, “about war and its destruction. A few sentences from the story: The war suddenly begins. It passes over the heads of the peasants and casts its ominous shadow on the ground. War does not give men the chance to say goodbye to their children. War kills and displaces innocent people…”
And you can see more of this work here.
From the ‘Crispy McBacon artwork of Parvin Heydarizadeh. Image: CCBF
More on this year’s Golden Pinwheel competition program at Shanghai is here, with many images.
The entry to the Golden Pinwheel exhibition at the 2024 China Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair. Image: CCBF
More from Publishing Perspectives on the China Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair is here. More from us on China’s market is here, our closely followed China Bestsellers series produced in association with Beijing OpenBook is here, more on illustration in the book business is here, and more on children’s books is here.