Kitty Crowther, illustrator and kids’s author: “Being deaf is part of my weaknesses. But it is also part of my strengths” | Culture | EUROtoday

The afternoon falls in Madrid and the hallways of La Casa Encendida are full of the voices and laughter of babies: in a couple of minutes the Abrapalabra International Children’s and Youth Literature Festival will start. With greater than 40 books translated into 20 languages, amongst this 12 months’s friends is Kitty Crowther (Brussels, 55 years previous), the Belgian author and illustrator who has reworked the youngsters’s album right into a territory the place the intimate, the wild and the delicate coexist.

Crowther greets. There is one thing in his gaze that appears to register not solely the shapes, but in addition the silence between them, as if every element had a hidden which means. The writer arrives a bit of late for the interview and apologizes: she has an harm to her foot, which has slowed her down, however it’s nothing critical, it’ll heal quickly. What won’t change, and has influenced her total life, is the deafness she has had since she was a baby. “I’m like babies who arrive, and they have to assimilate very quickly what’s happening around them. They use some sounds, but also expressions, body language, to decipher what’s around them,” she says when requested how she offers with it, not listening however studying the lips that ask it.

Personal difficulties apart, is it doable that your deafness has given you a novel approach of referring to the world and your individual artwork? “At the age of seven my problems began, and it took my parents a long time to realize that I was deaf, because the half-deaf child does not know that he is half-deaf. It took me time to have my own thoughts, because deafness problems are also difficulties with language and language. You cannot express your emotions and what is happening in your head. And that is where children’s books are super interesting, because of their emotional mechanics,” he says. “For seven years I went to the speech therapist twice a week to be able to know where to put the sound, where to place my tongue. This has developed in me a great sensitivity for sounds, for the sonority of words. I learned how to put two words that perhaps should not be together, but that come together to give a new image, a new sensation. I think that all of this is in my books. Being deaf is part of my personality; of my weaknesses, but also of my strengths,” she displays, earlier than broaden the social attain of the illness: “People like me contribute a lot to society. Not only the deaf, but also those who are autistic, or Asperger’s, who suffer from mental illness… Instead of trying to put everyone in a little box and lock them up, you can learn a lot from them.”

And what’s your artistic course of like? “Working with colors is addictive. Being able to add a small color that changes everything,” he explains. “I have studied a lot of art history, I have many works in my head. With all the studies I have done, I learned a lot from the great masters, from comic book authors to Munch. I couldn’t do what I do if I hadn’t had all that learning: all those teachers, those illustrators, those writers. Because we are, we produce, thanks to all those people, consciously or unconsciously. We must honor all those who have come before us,” he factors out.

Crowther has many works printed in varied Spanish publishers, and has lately printed with Fulgencio Pimentel Farwest, Ana del lago and I desire a canine. In his works—from mom jellyfish till the episodes of Poka & Mine— that non-public sensitivity is acknowledged: characters who communicate little however really feel rather a lot, landscapes the place nature murmurs, silences that weigh greater than phrases. “I get closer to reality through a more magical side, so to speak,” he displays. “Because looking at the water with all the depths, all the light, is magical. Or for me it is magical, wow: I think we live surrounded by magic. And that is where I find my strength. I am greatly inspired by the nature from which we all emerge. The truth is that I make no difference between what is human and what is natural,” says the writer, winner of the celebrated Astrid Lindgren Prize in 2010, and who will give a workshop after ending the interview. The workshop would be the beginning sign for Abrapalabra, organized by La Fábrica and La casa Distancia and can final 10 days wherein 53 authors will take part.

What issues can a baby get from one in every of your works that an grownup now not will get? Crowther smiles and shouts: “Mayday! Help! It’s a very difficult question. I always find it interesting when adults talk about ‘the children’. It seems that they are talking about something that is outside of themselves, something that they don’t remember. They don’t remember that they have been children,” he explains. “When a child asks me a question, I try to respond with another question, I find that it is much more constructive than simply giving a forceful answer. When my son found out that Santa Claus did not exist, he came and said to me, is this true? And I said, but let’s see, what do you think? And he said, I think so.” Questions for questions; the type of philosophy that Crowther initiatives in his books.

After greater than 40 books and worldwide recognition, what continues to drive you to create? “It is a huge gift to have the ability to create. I feel enormous gratitude. The older I get, the more gratitude I feel,” he laughs. “As I grow old, I’ve extra want to discover. In actuality, I haven’t got the feeling of selecting the tales, nor of drawing them, however fairly it’s one thing that passes by way of me, and I merely need to let myself. Children, generally, inform me that they want to go to that place that I’ve created. I really like that, as a result of it has been my refuge after I was little. And that’s linked to deafness: I might have been a lot lonelier if I had not had the unbelievable youngsters’s books that I had amongst me. So with my books I believe I give again a bit of little bit of that type of common hug. It’s not unhealthy, proper? No, it isn’t unhealthy in any respect.