The author of The Lion Inside visited St George’s International School this week, where she spoke to students and read from her work as part of a visit to Luxembourg organised through a collaboration between the school and the Luxembourg City Library.
RTL Today Radio caught up with Bright at St George’s to talk about her unlikely route into children's publishing, the process of creating picture books and why getting out of the studio to meet the children who read them has become such an important part of her work.
Her Luxembourg visit continues with a free public reading at the Luxembourg City Library, where families will have the chance to hear Bright read The Turtle Who Turned the Tide and The Lion Inside in English.
Bright's career as a children's author wasn't something she originally planned.
She told RTL Today Radio that she began writing during a long commute, simply because she enjoyed doing it, before discovering that children's stories were what naturally emerged.
“I didn't know at the time that you could kind of do it as a job,” she said.
Her eventual route into publishing was similarly unexpected. An editor from Puffin came across Bright's artwork at an exhibition, bought one of her etchings and subsequently asked to meet her.
One of the pieces of writing Bright showed her was a story that had begun life as a prose poem and remained in a drawer for years. It eventually became her 50th book, something Bright described as a reminder that creative ideas don't necessarily arrive on a convenient schedule.
“Some things happen slowly, some things happen quickly, but they all happen in their perfect time,” she said.
Bright originally illustrated her own books, completing the artwork for her first 14 herself, but becoming a mother eventually prompted her to begin working with other illustrators.
One of those collaborations was with Jim Field on The Lion Inside.
Bright admitted that handing over the visual side of one of her stories was initially daunting. But when the first illustrations arrived, the red pen she'd prepared to make changes was quickly put aside.
“When you work with someone, it becomes more than you could have created yourself, because it's two people's imaginations coming together,” she explained.
Her partnership with Field has since produced a series of books, with Bright describing an almost accidental synchronicity between their lives and the stories they've created together.
For Bright, getting the sound of a children's book right is just as important as what appears on the page.
She compares the writing process to songwriting, paying particular attention to rhythm and how the words feel when they're spoken.
“Picture books should feel like songs,” she said. “If it feels nice on your tongue to say it or feels nice in your ear to hear it, I always try and hear it like a song.”
And she puts that theory through some fairly extensive testing.
“I must read aloud a story more than a hundred times through the writing of it,” Bright said.
That matters because unlike many other forms of literature, a picture book is so often performed by one person for another.
“There's no other one that's really shared between an adult and a child in the same way,” she said. “It's almost like theatre.”
For Bright, hearing that children have begun finishing the lines of her books themselves is the children's-book equivalent of knowing the chorus to a song.
That connection with children was particularly apparent during her visit to St George’s.
Bright met students, saw the work produced by winners of an art competition and spoke about how much she gets back from events like these herself.
“I get inspired by being around kids,” she said.
“Sometimes we forget to play as adults and children are so connected to that. They just write stories for joy and they draw pictures for joy, and there's no end goal.”
But there's another reason she believes meeting authors and artists can matter to young people: it makes a creative life feel like something that is actually possible.
“Everything that we see around us began as an idea in our minds,” Bright said. “You could be the one that takes your idea into the world that could be of service to millions.”
Families will also have the opportunity to meet Rachel Bright during her Luxembourg visit, with a free English-language reading at the Luxembourg City Library.
Bright will read from The Turtle Who Turned the Tide and one of her best-known books, The Lion Inside.
Admission is free, with the event forming part of the City Library's Reading Nook programme, which gives families the opportunity to discover children's books in Luxembourgish, French, German, and English. The event runs from 11.30 to 12.30 and you should contact bibliotheque@vdl.lu for more details.
You can also listen back to our full interview with Rachel Bright at St George’s International School below.
