Farshore nets 20 deals for Willmore picture book

Farshore has secured 20 deals for author and illustrator Alex Willmore’s picture book I Did See a Mammoth.

Rights have been snapped up in Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, US English and Welsh, with several more deals currently being negotiated.

Harriet Rogers, art director for Farshore, secured world publishing rights last year for I Did See a Mammoth and from Willmore with Susan Penny, managing agent at The Bright Agency, as part of a four-book deal announced in 2022, taking his publishing up to 2026.

Rogers said: “Alex is a tremendous talent, brimming with fantastic new ideas. I’m so pleased to see I Did See a Mammoth being enjoyed by so many around the world, and I can’t wait to be able to share more from Alex soon.”

Willmore’s second book with Farshore, Spyceratops, was published by Farshore on 3rd August 2023. His third author-illustrator picture book with Farshore is scheduled for 2024.

Juliette Clark, rights director for Farshore and HarperCollins Children’s Books, said: “Alex’s work has a quality and uniqueness that marks him out as an international superstar in the making. It’s been a joy to see the passion and enthusiasm with which our publishing partners have embraced Mammoth and Alex.”

Willmore is the multi-award-winning illustrator of The Runaway Pea (S&S UK), written by Kjartan Poskitt, and is winner of the Shropshire Bookfest Picture Book Award and the Federation of Children’s Book Groups Children’s Book Award, as well as being nominated for the Kate Greenaway Medal and a finalist in the 2020 Oscar’s Book Prize.