Gianni Rodari

Italian author Gianni Rodari wrote many beloved children's books and was awarded the prestigious Andersen Prize. But he was also an educator of paramount importance in Italy and an activist who understood the liberating power of the imagination. He is one of the twentieth century's greatest authors for children, and Italy's greatest. Influenced by French surrealism and linguistics, Rodari stressed the importance of poetic language, metaphor, made-up language, and play. At a time when schooling was all about factual knowledge, Rodari wrote The Grammar of Fantasy, a radically imaginative book about storytelling and play. He was a forerunner of writing techniques such as the "fantastic binomial" and the utopian, world engendering "what if...." The relevance of Rodari's works today lies in his poetics of imagination, his humanist yet challenging approach to reality, and his themes, such as war and peace, immigration, injustice, inequality, and liberty. Forty years after his death, Rodari's writing is as powerful and innovative as ever. He died in Rome in 1980.

Beatrice Alemagna has written and illustrated dozens of children's books, which have received numerous awards all over the world and have been translated into 14 languages. The author-illustrator of two New York Times Best Illustrated books, she has also been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award seven times and shortlisted for the Hans Christian Andersen Award twice. Enchanted Lion has published four of her picture books: The Wonderful Fluffy Little Squishy; Child of Glass; Telling Stories Wrong; and the forthcoming You Can't Kill Snow White, a picture book for teens and adults, published under Enchanted Lion's Unruly imprint. Born in Bologna, Italy, Alemagna lives and works in Paris, France.