Why illustrations are crucial for children of all ages

Published on: 11 September 2024

Olivia Ahmad, one of the judges for the Klaus Flugge Illustration Prize, shares why pictures are something to treasure.

The Klaus Flugge Prize is an annual award for newcomers to picture books: those books where words and pictures mingle and rely on each other.

Picture books are hard to make: conjuring a total and convincing world, devising a visual rhythm that pulls you from one page to the next, and balancing the delicate space between what the pictures tell you and what the text says (or doesn't say) is the work of hugely committed and creative people.

Yet illustrators are often undervalued, and so a chance to celebrate the achievements of debut picture book illustrators is an important one. Together, this year's longlisted books show how ambitious and vibrant UK children's publishing is.

Exploring the shortlist

The books on this year's shortlist aren't made for prizes and industry, they're for young readers – surely the best audience there is. Their minds are open and anything is possible, or as US author-illustrator Maurice Sendak put it, children "will tolerate ambiguities, peculiarities, and things illogical; will take them into their unconscious and deal with them as best they can".

Bia Melo's debut, The Dream Book, takes full advantage of this, taking her reader on a wild ride through an anarchic dream world. Unexpected things happen in the real world too: Sarthak Sinha's book Farah Loves Mangos takes place under a mango tree and Olga Shtonda's Henri and the Machine is set in an art gallery. Both are laugh-out-loud funny.

Emily Kapff's haunting book The Crown blends an imagined future and the present, delivering a much-needed letter of warning from a dystopian and ecologically barren future.

The shortlisted books bring us true stories from the past, too. Kate Winter's book on palaeontologist Mary Anning, The Fossil Hunter, and Angela Vives' illustrations for J.T. Williams' Bright Stars of Black British History give tangible and relatable form to histories that have been concealed and overlooked – an urgent task when those stories are discredited and denied.

Why children are drawn to pictures in books

Picture books flex to all these different kinds of storytelling and more. They're all needed. For the children who have access to them, picture books are a first experience of art and literature. They create rich worlds that children are instinctively drawn to interpret and are completely absorbed by.

If you read regularly with young people, you might find that a much-loved illustrated book is asked for again and again and remains fascinating each time. Why is that? It might be the rewarding process of deciphering images: many young children can quickly find meaning in colour, tone, gestures, and body language. Over time, mulling over busy scenes, visual metaphors, and strange juxtapositions provides evolving insights.

Most of us find images more memorable than words, and children ruminate on the illustrations that make an impression on them, finding connections to their own lives, exploring new perspectives, finding jokes, imagining alternative possibilities. As Lara, aged 6, quoted in a study for Children Reading Pictures: Interpreting Visual Texts, rightly says, "The writing doesn't explain everything what you think about."

It has long been noted that illustration draws early and reluctant readers to text and supports verbal literacy. That's a powerful and vital thing, but illustration does so much more than that. Too often, reading pictures is seen as a stepping stone to more 'advanced' reading; that it's a phase that ends.

But reading pictures is something entirely different; it's complex, challenging, enjoyable and something we can get joy from throughout our lives. And, in our image-saturated world, where things aren't always what they seem, learning to read and interpret pictures on our own terms is increasingly essential.

Olivia Ahmad is Artistic Director at Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, the charity establishing the UK's first public arts space for historic and contemporary illustration. It will open in Clerkenwell in 2026. She is one of the judges on this year's Klaus Flugge Prize.