First all-female shortlist for Klaus Flugge Prize

Fifi Kuo and Jessica Love are on the first all-female shortlist for this year’s £5,000 Klaus Flugge Prize for the most exciting newcomer to children’s picture book illustration.

Kuo portrays the joy children find in discovering their abilities and new things about the world in I Can Fly (Boxer Books), and Love explores themes of freedom in Julian Is a Mermaid (Walker Books).

Kuo and Love are shortlisted alongside four other debuts: The Extraordinary Gardner by Sam Boughton (Tate), Looking After Daddy by Eve Coy (Andersen Press), The King Who Banned the Dark by Emily Haworth-Booth (Pavilion Children’s Books) and Red and the City by Marie Voigt (OUP).

The shortlist represents illustration from around the world - with shortlistees coming from Germany, Taiwan and the US, as well as the UK—and four out of six are graduates of the Cambridge School of Art’s MA in Children’s Book Illustration (Boughton, Coy, Haworth-Booth and Kuo).

Julia Eccleshare, chair of the judges, said: “Our 2019 shortlist is very exciting and represents the range of talent and skill in today’s new picture book illustrators. It also perfectly demonstrates how much picture books give children—reassurance, knowledge and understanding of themselves and the word as well as that first appreciation of art and realisation that images can tell us more than words.

The shortlist was chosen from a longlist of 20 books by a panel of judges who included illustrator Anthony Browne and Kate Milner, who won last year’s award. The winner will be revealed at an award ceremony in London on 11th September.

The Klaus Flugge Prize was founded in 2016 to honour publisher and Andersen Press founder, Klaus Flugge.

(Left to right): Anthony Browne, Marie Voigt, Fifi Kuo, Eve Coy, Klaus Flugge, Sam Boughton and Kate Milner