Meet the illustrator Catherine Louis from Switzerland

In this audio interview (in French) Catherine Louis talks about her book Les yeux de Bianca

Printed in text, relief and Braille, the book tells the story of Bianca, a blind little girl who discovers the world around her. A different world.

This image comes from Il giardino di Nonna Li (Grandma Li's Garden). Every morning Nonna Li goes to the river of the singing bridge to fill her two jars with water. The little Yun who accompanies her notices that one of her two is losing. Why doesn't she replace it with a new one? Because she so she waters and makes the flowers grow along the way. Being old and a little cracked doesn't make an object useless! A sweet tale about the wear of time and the beauty of the world. With a few Chinese words to discover along the road that leads to the Song Bridge river.

In this interview Catherine talks about the Chinese influence you can see in her illustrations: I think I've been drawn to the images of this culture since I was 12, 13. Then there were many meetings, and for years I also practiced martial arts; but I have always thought that calligraphy was something exclusively of the Chinese. I was overwhelmed by emotion when one day I saw an exhibition of Chinese painting and calligraphy and I met the artist… she was (an African American woman) seventy years old, very outgoing. We became friends and she sent me to a calligrapher to practice this art; then we went to China, with him and twelve students, to work for fifteen days with the great masters of Chinese calligraphy. I hate travelling as a tourist, but discovering a little piece of China while practicing calligraphy is something exceptional. So it came to my mind to tell Chinese culture through stories and legends.

Catherine Louis was born in 1963 in La Neuveville, a small town in the Bernese Jura, surrounded by vineyards. To date she has created 130 works: illustrated storybooks, collections of poems, picture books, leporellos, books as objects, song collections, early-reader books, and even books for artists. She employs a range of techniques, line drawings, collage, paper cut-outs, linocuts and digital work for her illustrations. Her first picture book was published in German: Die Möwe Fridolin (Fridolin the seagull). An early work, Léon et Ciboulette (1996) was included in the White Ravens selection in 1997 and the IBBY Honour List in 1998.  IBBY.org

There are English language editions of books illustrated by Catherine Louis published here in Australia by Walker Books. You can see more books by Catherine on her web site. 

Here are the five books submitted to the Hans Christian Andersen judges:  Mô et le maître du temps  (Mo and the Master of time), Le rat m'a dit. La vraie histoire de l'horoscope chinois  (The rat told me. The true story of the Chinese zodiac), both written by Marie Sellier and published by Picquier Jeunesse, Les yeux de Bianca  (Bianca's eyes, written by Marie Sellier and published by Loisirs et pédagogie),  Contes d’Orient  (Tales of the Orient, written by Jihad Darwiche and published by Saltimbanque) and  Mon imagier chinois  (My little book of Chinese words, written by Shi Bo and published by Picquier Jeunesse).

Translated from French, the book What the Rat Told Me is a retelling of a folktale about the creation of the Chinese Zodiac. This is a story of a trickster—the rat—and how each animal was chosen for the zodiac. As the Emperor, ruler of Heaven and Earth, invites all the animals to visit him before sunrise at the top of Jade Mountain, the clever rat devises a plan—he tricks the cat into sleeping late with a promise to wake her up in the morning. The rat cleverly ignores his promise, and hops on the ox to ride up Jade Mountain to be the first to reach the emperor. Each animal that arrives at the mountain top is rewarded with a year for all time. Since the cat remained asleep, she has been left out of the Chinese calendar. And this, the reader is informed, is why the cat and the rat are not friends.