'I write, illustrate and love books but dyslexia means reading isn't easy for me'
There’s a fondness that remains with Kate Rolfe for the many happy childhood days she spent discovering the treasures of the art department at Yorkshire’s Bretton Hall College.
“My father worked there,” she explains. "So I used to go and get to draw and play with all of the art materials that they had. I spent most of my childhood making up stories and drawing pictures to go with them. And I just never stopped.”
At 18, she was still buying and making picture books, and even sent one off to various publishers. She wasn’t quite ready back then, but now Wakefield-born Kate is an established author and illustrator – and she’s recently won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for Illustration for her picture book Wiggling Words.
The tale was described by judges – an expert panel of children’s librarians – as a deeply personal yet universal exploration that offers insight into what reading is like for people with dyslexia. It is illustrated innovatively, they said, to capture a “transformative journey from confusion to confidence”, empowering the celebration of creativity and the shared experience of learning to read.
"I absolutely love books, but reading isn’t easy for me,” says 42-year-old Kate. “Wiggling Words was inspired by my experience as a dyslexic reader, but it’s a book for every child learning to read. It celebrates creative problem-solving and playful ways into stories.” It also carries a positive message, she says. “Even if you are struggling to find something that works for your brain, keep trying because eventually you'll find it and it will click for you. It took until I was 38 really before I found something that worked, but I did.”
For a long time, picture books were on the “back burner” for Kate. After studying animation and then film production at university, she spent a period working in film and television before later setting up her own business. In 2017, however, she decided to turn serious attention to her writing and drawing, and embarked on a course in children’s book illustration at the Cambridge School of Art.
Whilst there, she developed what became her first two books and at the end of the course attracted interest from agents and publishers. “I'm so glad that I actually decided to take it seriously because for so much of my adult life, it was just something that I was doing on the back burner,” she reflects. “It was really from that moment when I decided to really immerse myself and study it and I've done very little but children's books ever since that point.”
Kate, who these days is based in Suffolk, says she hopes to use her win to champion picture books and diversity and inclusion in children’s storytelling. “It's really important to see other people's perspectives, and to read books that feature characters that are not like you,” she says, adding: “I believe that picture books move the needle on our values. So the stories that really capture our hearts when we're young really inspire the people that we turn out to be because they instil our values.”