BOB GRAHAM is a Kate Greenaway-winning author and illustrator whose works include acclaimed children’s picture books such as How to Heal a Broken Wing, Max, Jethro Byrde: Fairy Child and April Underhill: Tooth Fairy.

His latest picture book, A Hatful of Dreams, celebrates the special bond between grandparents and grandchildren.

What sparked the idea for A Hatful of Dreams?

Ideas don’t often spark, they mostly smoulder. My early books were filled with my own personal experiences e.g. a child would never have a party balloon in her hand and extended skyward in my illustration. Helium was unknown in any parties of the ’50s or later, so in my picture the balloon would be bumping along the ground behind her joylessly.

In Rose Meets Mr Wintergarten and against all editorial advice, (‘Wouldn’t it be safer to have the family watch the sun come up from their front step?’) I put them all up on the roof – and the pet sheep for good measure.

So all these years later when A Hatful of Dreams slowly announced its presence I had no trouble in putting anything under Grandad’s hat – the whole universe if I wanted.

How do you balance storytelling with pictures in your work?

Well, in A Hatful of Dreams I started with a street full of abandoned houses. I gave it a narrator to take the reader down the street and introduce … Who? Like most people telling stories I have to constantly ask myself, ‘What happened next?’ Or ‘What happened before?’ And somehow I found the Andersons. And although parts of them may have been drawn from whatever personal history and observations remain embedded in my head – and sometimes notebook – they are largely an entity to themselves.

I do know this though, that when our grandson Oliver visits us regularly and plays us his latest tune, that I love the sound of his fingers squeaking and squealing on the strings of his guitar.

I gave that direct to the Grandad, and just as I put the sheep on the roof in Rose Meets Mr Wintergarten I slung Grandad’s leg over the couch for good measure. Made him right at home!

This story is filled with hope and love – who is it for?

Lovely! This would seem partly a rhetorical question and what author could ask for more than ‘hope and love’ to come from someone’s reading of a story? I have long said that I write stories about people who let their dogs push them off the couch. That’s at least ‘love’. The reader will have to go looking for the ‘hope’ there.

The book is for anyone who likes to pick it up and spend time with it, be it in a bookshop, a library, a Salvation Army shop or a school jumble sale. I would like to someday see it with dog-eared pages and a few biscuit crumbs trapped in the spine. •

Age Guide 3+

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Graham is a Kate Greenaway-winning author-illustrator who has written and illustrated many acclaimed children’s picture books including How to Heal a Broken Wing, How the Sun Got to Coco’s House, Max, Jethro Byrde: Fairy Child and April Underhill: Tooth Fairy. His 2011 title, A Bus Called Heaven, is endorsed by Amnesty International UK and was the winner of the 2012 Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year Award – a prize Bob has won an unprecedented six times. In 2014, Silver Buttons was awarded a prestigious Prime Minister’s Literary Award in Australia. Bob lives in Melbourne.