Books for little “citizens of the world”

“One step ahead: getting globalized together with Ukrainian-English picture books” is the title of the project founded by Oksana Lushchevska, a Ukrainian children’s writer, who’s working on her doctor’s thesis at the University of Georgia, together with the cofounder of the Bratske Publishing House Yulia Berezenko, and literary reviewer and writer Valentyna Vzdulska. According to the program of the project, children’s bilingual books of international level will be published in Ukraine. The initiators of the project think that these books will help promote Ukrainian language and culture in the world, implement in Ukraine modern samples of picture books and bilingual books for children, and develop lingual and aesthetic competence and global consciousness.

For starts, two books have been chosen for publishing. The work on the first one is in full swing. This is a book of one poem “How many?” by well-known Ukrainian writer and translator Halyna Kyrpa. Oksana Lushchevska and Mykhailo Naidan have translated the poem into English. Artist Olha Havrylova is working on the illustrations.

“We want to create picture books that will transfer the unique experience of a child, independently from geographic location, so that owing to them the child could plunge into the layer of Ukrainian culture. The poem ‘How much?’ will be a game-book, a counting book, and a poetry book. It will encourage the reader to count, to read, or to listen to verse, how the text sounds in two languages, look for common and different things between them, understand and learn how the question is built. It will develop the aesthetic taste and have cultural identifiers in illustrations and in the text (Kyiv Dnipro, Carpathian spruces, etc.),” Oksana Lushchevska explained to The Day, “We would like these two books to become a certain basis for further publishing of picture books in two languages, Ukrainian and English. Such books are able to broaden the understanding of global connections and arouse interest for better cognizing of one another, so they give us an opportunity to become ‘citizens of the world’ develop global and local consciousness at the same time, which is badly needed in the circumstances our country is living in.”

“We have been looking for texts everywhere: in the books of classics, and modern books,” editor Yulia Berezenko, whose publishing house, Bratske, is going to publish these books, tells about the principles of selecting texts for the project, “I aimed to find a ‘therapeutic’ plot, an adventure from the routine life of children. Such texts softly teach children and their parents to overcome various problems that happen in their lives: ‘a favorite thing gets lost,’ ‘it is time to leave the playground,’ etc. For bilingual books the ‘routine’ topics have an extra bonus – learning of everyday vocabulary in a foreign language. We have been fortunate to arrange cooperation with Ania Khromova, who not only writes wonderful poetry and prose, but also is bringing up two little sons. Therefore the second manuscript is a story about a boy, a coin, and his pocket with a whole.”

The initiative is presented on the website of financing creative projects based on crowdfunding scheme – KICKSTARTER. The authors of the project need to raise 5,000 dollars in order to have an opportunity to publish the first two books in the near future. It is planned to publish the next books for the money received from selling the first two. “Everything depends on whether the first two books will be commercially successful. We have raised the money for the first one, but there is still not enough for the second one. If we could publish and sell these two books, we could create a whole series of bilingual books. We have found Ukrainian texts that will sound good in English and at the same time serve as identifiers of our culture, make learning of English and Ukrainian languages easier,” Oksana Lushchevska sums up. Everyone can finance the project on the  KICKSTARTER website.