Congratulations to Levi Pinfold for winning the English Association’s 7-11 years Picture Book Award for his strange and beautiful fable, PARADISE SANDS.

Established in 1995, the awards are presented to the best children’s Fiction and Non-Fiction picture books of the year.

The English Association said of the book,

"This is a cleverly written tale that combines magical enchantment with atmospheric illustrations to entice readers to read and re-read the story. We are drawn into the magic from the first page by an unsettling rhyme warning us of Teller’s Hollow. The story is told by a young girl, travelling with her brothers, to visit their mother. As each page is turned, a line of the rhyme lures the family away from the road and into a ‘paradise’, where the unsuspecting brothers fall victim to The Teller’s enchantment. The young sister, depicted in a pale blue dress that contrasts with the otherwise muted palette, resists his spell and meets The Teller himself: a stunning ‘Aslanesque’ lion. Desperate to free her brothers, the girl accepts the lion’s challenge. Further links are made with Narnia: a stone table and the temptation that leads to entrapment. Double-spread illustrations contribute much to the tale and represent the marriage between text and pictures that the English 4-11 Picture Book Awards seeks to celebrate. Layers within the plot and twist in the tale might not reveal itself to some readers on their first read but lends itself beautifully to being explored as a class in a unit of work."

Levi Pinfold is an award winning illustrator, who won the Booktrust Early Years Award for Best Emerging Illustrator with his first picture book, The Django, and his second, picture book Black Dog, was awarded the CILIP Kate Greenaway medal, and the AOI Children’s Book  illustration award.

Levi has since won the Amnesty CILIP Honour for the Illustrations in his collaboration with A. F. Harrold, The Song From Somewhere Else published by Bloomsbury. Their second book together, The Worlds We leave Behind is shortlisted this year for the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration.

Paradise Sands is published by Walker Books and you can buy a copy from any good bookshop and online at Bookshop.org.