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Child and Cowell sign up to book bench project
Children’s authors Lauren Child and Cressida Cowell have announced they will design “BookBenches” for a public art project, organised by the National Literacy Trust (NLT), which will take place this summer.
This July, the NLT, working with Wild in Art, will place 50 benches around London, all shaped as open books, as part of the Books about Town project. The aim is to celebrate London’s literacy legacy and raise funds to tackle low literacy levels.
Cowell is designing a bench based on her book How to Train a Dragon (Hodder Children’s Books) and said she hopes the project will remind Londoners of the “joy of reading books”. Child’s bench will be based on her Clarice Bean series, which is published by Orchard Books.
Other benches announced this week include one based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass (Penguin Popular Classics), painted by illustrator Ralph Steadman, and one based on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (Corgi), painted by artist Paul Kidby.
In addition, the estates of Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming are taking part to sponsor benches in honour of Poirot, Sherlock and James Bond, respectively.
The NLT launched the BookBench project last November, when it announced benches based on Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (Walker Books) and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (A Bed Book).
