The Big Picture: Best New Illustrators longlist

Children's books by the 27 longlisted illustrators were all first published in the UK after 2000. Ten winners will be chosen from the list by the Big Picture Committee and announced by Michael Rosen at Bologna Children's Book Fair on 31 March 2008.

The longlist:

Deborah Allwright

Laura Carlin

Alexis Deacon

Polly Dunbar

Lisa Evans

Shelley Fowles

Emily Gravett

Mini Grey

Laura Hambleton

Oliver Jeffers

Simone Lia

Sam Lloyd

David Lucas

Sarah Massini

Mei Matsuoka

Sam McCullen

Alice Melvin

Gwen Milward

Catherine Rayner

David Roberts

Viviane Schwarz

Joel Stewart

Il Sung Na

Kanako Usui

Vicky White

Thomas Doherty

Mungo M'Cosh

The ten Best New Illustrators will participate in promotional activity intended to raise the significance and importance of illustration. Such activity includes collaboration with Rough Guides to produce The Rough Guide to Picture Books which will be published April 2008.
The illustrators will be appearing in a range of library, festival and bookshop events and promotions throughout 2008 with the Campaign for Learning and for The Big Draw in October. They will also be involved with Waterstones' promotional campaign over the summer ‘If you Liked....You'll Love' designed to introduce readers to modern illustrators and remind them of much loved classics.

The Big Picture Judging Committee comprises author and illustrator Anthony Browne, Sunday Times journalist Nicolette Jones, Antonia Byatt, director of literature strategy at Arts Council England, and author Malorie Blackman.

The Big Picture Campaign was launched in 2007 as a new initiative aimed at promoting picture books and illustrators. Led by Booktrust in partnership with Bookstart, and supported by a range of children's publishers, the campaign aims to stimulate confidence in the market for picture books.

Booktrust and its associates seek to build an appreciation of picture books on a number of levels: to encourage new audiences to discover picture books, to support new and emerging illustrators and to celebrate the contribution that picture books can make to a child's development. It will also look at how picture books are valued as collector's items and pieces of art in their own right.  

The Big Picture campaign is supported by Michael Rosen, Children's Laureate:  
"The picture book is a unique, intricate and massively various art form. It offers families and classrooms a space in which ideas and emotions can be pored over, questioned, discussed and felt.

"Picture books are the fuse that lights our awareness that reading is full of intense pleasures.

"If schools aren't the places where a huge range of these small works of art are to be discovered, many children will never find their way to this pleasure. With this in mind, I'm looking forward to working closely with the Booktrust's initiative The Big Picture."

For more information please contact Katherine Solomon on katherine@booktrust.org.uk.