We are so excited for our Beak Speaks event next month. Join us for an evening with the wonderful Jessica Love and Deirdre Sullivan who will be discussing their beautiful picture book 'Little Passenger'.
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Little Passenger is an intimate journey through
pregnancy and captures the deep connection between a mother and her unborn child
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Jessica Love is the award winning author & illustrator of 'Julián Is a Mermaid', 'Julián at the
Wedding' and 'A Bed of Stars'. 'Julián is a Mermaid', her debut picture book, won the Stonewall Book Award and Klaus Flugge Prize.
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Deirdre Sullivan is an award winning writer from Galway, Ireland. She has written extensively for Young Adults and her books include 'Tangleweed and Brine' and 'Savage Her Reply'. Tangleweed and Brine won the 28th CBI Book of the Year Awards.
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We look forward to hearing about Jessica and Deirdre’s book 'Little Passenger'. Discussing
where they get their creative ideas from and how they worked together on this project.
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Following the talk there will be an audience Q&A opportunity. Tickets are sold through Eventbrite and are non-refundable. Zoom links will be emailed directly to you on the day of the event around 5pm UK time. The event is LIVE -
but buying a ticket will give you access to a recording which will be available to view back for one week afterwards. You will be sent a link for this the day after the event.
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#JessicaLove #DeirdreSullivan #LittlePassenger #OrangeBeak #BeakSpeaks #Picturebooks
Book now for Divided Selves with Helen Oyeyemi!
Hear Helen Oyeyemi in conversation with Deirdre Sullivan about her mischievous and imaginative novel A New New Me which stars a woman called Kinga who is split seven ways. She has one self for each day of the week, with no two ever in full agreement.
📅 Friday 22 May
🕰️ 8pm
🎫 Link in bio
Dark, lyrical and quietly powerful, Savage Her Reply reimagines an old Irish myth through a bold, feminist lens.
With haunting prose and a fierce emotional core, Deirdre Sullivan gives voice to a woman long silenced, exploring rage, resilience and the power of reclaiming your own story.
In 2020, it won our Teen & Young Adult Book of the Year and it’s now nominated as one of the best Irish books of the last 20 years. The final list will be revealed on Monday 20th April.
@littleislandbks #20YearsOfIBA
Honoured to be nominated alongside writers I admire and books I've adored. Savage Her Reply, and Aífe, are very dear to my heart, and while it's always a bit strange to ask for votes, if you've read it and connected with her, it would mean a lot.
Happy PUBLICATION DAY (in the US) to LITTLE PASSENGER! Gorgeously, gorgeously written by Deirdre Sullivan @propermiss and illustrated by yours truly. I am in love with this book. It’s a really good one to give to the mothers in your life. And the babies.
Available now, wherever books are sold.
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BRILLIANT BOOK ALERT ❤️
Little Passenger by Deirdre Sullivan and Jessica Love
‘Little Passenger. I have made space for you inside my heart. It will always be a little bigger than you are. To give you room to grow.’
Little Passenger is quite simply one of the most beautiful picture books I’ve come across in years. From the textured cover to the delicious water-colour illustrations, this is a book that was created with love.
It’s a love letter from a mother to an unborn baby. As the baby grows inside her, she chronicles their time together and tells her growing little one about the world outside. ‘It is a big surprise,’ she says. ‘But you might like surprises.’
The illustrations, inspired by embroidery and quilting, are stunning and a joy to pour over, from the tiny stitches around the boarders, to the waiting mum (and her tabby cat).
The first time I read this book I was so moved by what the author and illustrator had captured on paper – the wonder, hope, vulnerability and mystery of carrying and birthing a baby – that I cried. The opening page also sensitively acknowledges little passengers who didn’t make it. A timeless book very much for adults as well as children. Age 4+
#discoveririshkidsbooks @irishkidsbooks
Published by @walkerpicturebooks
Signed copies available @halfwayupthestairsbookshop
I am proud that Jess responded to my words with her thought, care, skill and wild talent. I am proud that the team at Walker nurtured and nourished the book along the path to finding itself, and to publication. I am proud that Clare met my insomnia-notes app-poem with grace and connection and I am proud of the book that this lead to. Most of all, though. I am proud of my own Little Passenger, who stood up on a chair in Charlie Byrne’s bookshop last weekend and shouted out ‘Mama’s Book Was Inspired by ME.’
It was at first, but now it is a book with many Mamas and I’m grateful to all of them. If you read it, I hope you like it, and that some of you might share it with your own Little Passengers, wild swimming in the deep of you.
When Little Passenger was acquired, it didn’t have an illustrator yet. I trusted Maria’s vision, and when Jessica’s name came up it felt very right indeed. I’m pasting in my response to Maria’s initial email here:
“Jess is an incredible picture book maker, and her work is so beautiful and layered. There's a depth of nuance and feeling that permeates her work. They're like visual poems, full of reassurance and possibility. And she's so good at depicting liminal spaces and vivid and tender transformative moments.”
It was a week of voice-finding in our small home. Things felt brighter and braver. I keep typing and deleting more information about my child, because I have such vivid and stark memories of that time, and I love talking about her, but those parts aren’t simply mine, they’re ours. Hannah Lee signed a copy of The Rapping Princess for my kid one year shortly after that, and whenever I read her that book, the kind words make me well up. Voices matter. Our coos and croons, our howls.
Jess has written, with more insight than I ever could, about her artistic process. I will say this. It was a gift to watch, and to notice the synchronicities, colour and number choices, moments and images that felt specific and universal, playful and weighty. When the visual voice for the project, the quilt, the shaker art was found, I sent some images of my pregnancy (some of which are included here), and some poetry I had written, while at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, working on Weave with Oein DeBhardiun and Yingge Xu, shortly after my baby’s first birthday.
At this stage I was well into days of buggy walks, tummy time, and bedtime stories (babies have a lot of bedtimes, so they need a lot of bedtime stories). We read Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, Little You by Richard Van Camp and Julie Flett, (both gifts from the magnificent Sarah Webb), Mo Chuid Amhráin Gaeilge by Tatyana Feeney and Risteard MacLiam, Emily’s Garden by Kate Coombs and Carmen Lemniscates, and a whole range of books about where things were. Where’s Mr Dog by Ingela P. Arrhenius being a particular favourite. It was a time of constantly being grabbed, by little hands (adorable), the outside world (less welcome) and by stories (shared in different ways, joint attention on a picture book, or novels during sleepy feeds and naps). I had worried about motherhood changing me, whether this act of creation and togetherness would mean that the more solitary ones had to disappear for a time. And this wasn’t the case. They were re-shaped, as I was. Things take time, but there is time to be taken when the nights are endless.
I do not want to give the impression that I suddenly became Leo Tolstoy however. I spent a lot of time rewatching Dawson’s Creek. I jotted things down that went nowhere. But I hadn’t run out of curiosity or creativity, the impulse to make sense of things, or share them, not at all. My body was healing, my brain was reeling, but my heart was full. Making things made perfect sense. There’s a line in Jessica’s book, Julian at the Wedding “A wedding is a party for love”. A book can be that too, I think. Little Passenger has been held and guided by loving hands all the way along.
It’s hard to know when a piece of work is ready to share. I’m lucky enough to work with a wonderful agent, @clarewall.ace , who has shown me a lot of kindness, human to human throughout our time together, and never more-so than in the days of my pregnancy and early motherhood. She’d seen some of my earlier attempts at a picture book, and understood the twisty way I work, so I sent it to her, around a month before my Pumpkin was due to arrive. It was written like a poem, because that’s what it was, a love poem. She believed in it, and hoped that it would find the right home. She also had a deep and intuitive sense that the right home for it would be with Maria Tunney and Deirdre McDermott at Walker books, because of their sensitivity and skill with negotiating lyrical texts.
