The book published in Colombia has received various awards around the world.
Photo: Rey Naranjo Editores
The book “How Lucky I Am!”, written by Lawrence Schimel and illustrated by Juan Camilo Mayorga, was first published in Spanish by Rey Naranjo Editores in 2018. This children’s book recently received the Crystal Kite Award, which is awarded by the Society of Children’s Book Authors and Illustrators in the United States.
“Jose is an intelligent boy with a good memory, he can read without light, he tells the best stories in the world, and he even has a little dog! An eight-year-old boy tells us the reasons why he feels lucky; one of them is the luck of having an only brother like his: Jose. And it is only natural that the narrator feels lucky for his brother, since he, Jose, is also very lucky: he can read even when his parents ask him to turn off the light, he can have a Labrador as a pet all his own, and he can easily remember where everything is in his house,” is the synopsis posted on the publisher’s website.
According to John Naranjo, the first contact with the author occurred in 2014, when the publisher won the New Horizon award at the Bologna Book Fair. Schimel approached Naranjo because he wanted to publish with them and thus the project that would culminate in the book “How lucky I am!” was born. With the manuscript of the car, they began to work on the illustrations made by Juan Camilo Mayorga.
“Originally, it dealt with the issue of the inclusion of people with disabilities, in this case visual. The secret of the book and the reason why it was awarded by the IBBY last year, is that at no time do the protagonists or the omniscient narration imply that the main character is blind, this is discovered by the reader in the middle of the book where There is a text in Braille, although there are certain clues throughout the work,” said Naranjo.
This children’s book has been translated into more than thirty languages and was submitted to this Spanish edition by an association of “colleagues.” Additionally, it has been selected for different public libraries around the world as “a call to work in the pedagogy of visual disabilities. Behind this book there is a lot of field work, that is why we had to be in communication with the INCI and the edition was made with the text in Braille. Disability has many levels and this is a call to assisted reading. It is a book that puts us in the panorama of great creators of children’s publishing and publishing that seeks the inclusion of disabilities,” said the editor.
