Blimey! What an exciting and surprising month it’s been. One of my recent translations, The War within These Walls, written by Aline Sax, illustrated by Caryl Strzelecki, and published by Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, has won a hat-trick of amazing awards in the United States: the Jewish Book Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, the Sydney Taylor Book Award silver medal, and a Mildred L. Batchelder honor award. Check out the book trailer for this chilling and important story.

Truus Matti’s Mister Orange, which I translated for the multiple-award-winning Enchanted Lion, won the 2014 Mildred L. Batchelder Award for “the most outstanding children’s book originally published in a language other than English in a country other than the United States, and subsequently translated into English for publication in the United States”. Jenni Desmond designed the beautiful cover.

Both of these books were very deserving winners and I’m so pleased that they’ve received this recognition. Congratulations to everyone involved, from the original publishers, Leopold (Mister Orange) and De Eenhoorn (De kleuren van het getto), to the fabulous US publishers who have enthusiastically selected and published these books in translation. Let’s hope that this encourages more English-language publishers to consider great Dutch and Flemish books for translation!

In other news, I recently had a chat with Mina Witteman, my good friend and SCBWI Regional Advisor for the Netherlands, about translation and about the SCBWI. The interview is on the SCBWI NL website.

I also talked to the lovely Zoe Toft, who’s a keen reader of Dutch children’s literature, about books and about The Letter for the King in particular. Zoe’s posted the interview over at her website Playing by the Book.

Thanks, Zoe and Mina!