Children’s author Katherine Rundell introduces original poems, 
stories and illustrations from more than 110 children’s writers and illustrators including Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson, Anthony Horowitz and Axel Scheffler in a new collection of stories and poems and essays and drawings - including cats and hares and plastic-devouring caterpillars, doodles and flowers, revolting and beautiful poems, and stories of space travel and new shoes and dragons.
You can download The Book of Hopes (PDF) from the National Literacy Trust.
"It’s dedicated to the doctors, nurses, carers and all those working in hospitals to protect us: they are the stuff that wild, heroic tales are made of ..." says Katherine Rundell.
You might also want to visit the family zone on the National Literacy Trust website for more links to literary resources in this time of school closures.
So a few weeks ago, in search of that defibrillation for the imagination that happens when the right reader meets the right story (and in truth, in part to fight back at my own sadness and fear), I emailed some of the children’s writers and artists whose work I love most. I asked them to write something, or draw something, anything, that would offer that galvanic sense of possibility even in darkness. The response was glorious, which shouldn’t have surprised me. So many children’s writers and illustrators are themselves already hunters and gatherers of hope; manufacturers and peddlers of wonder.
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