A lovely surprise in my email the other day: Margrete Lamond, the wonderful publisher at Dirt Lane Press, sent me the first two colour spreads for The Snowman’s Wish, my book with the extraordinary Iranian Australian illustrator Ronak Taher, which is to be published by Dirt Lane in 2020. I am so thrilled with Ronak’s illustrations: they are absolutely glorious, bursting with colour, character and tenderness. As Margrete put it so well, the book will: ‘glow like an opal, its colours and decorative motifs a contemporary expression of traditional Persian art.’

The story is very special to me, having come out of a dream, and an image of a snowman standing under pine trees, with the first words themselves of the text strangely and wondrously on my lips as I awoke: The snowman was new to the world/and the world was new to him…Spine tingling, I rushed to my desk then and scribbled the whole thing down, feeling the gentle, joyful and melancholy magic of it rush through my storytelling veins, and knowing I had something pretty special there. Which seemed indeed to be the case because both my agent Margaret Connolly and then Margrete, when we sent it to her, loved it at once. And when Margrete sent it to Ronak to consider illustrating, she loved it too. It is just so exciting to see the progress on it, and the gorgeous visual world that Ronak is creating, and I’m delighted to be able to share these first two spreads with you.