What is BookHoof?
BookHoof is an association created by Christine Evain and Spencer Hawkridge for the production and promotion of children’s literature.
The inspiration for the BookHoof association comes from an event that was run in conjunction with students from three institutions in Nantes – Centrale Nantes (an Engineering School), Audencia (a Business School) and ENSA (a School of Architecture) – who were set the task of producing a children’s story book across a three-day period.
We are greatly indebted to Book Dash who provided us with the model with which to organize this event and essentially, the Book Dash model is about bringing together groups of people with the shared goal of writing, illustrating, formatting and editing a story book across a 12-hour period. At the end of the 12 hours each small group should have produced a story book which is ready to be uploaded onto an open-source platform where it is available free of charge for anyone to access and read. In addition, the driving motivation for the Book Dash organisers was to provide children’s literature to the many children in South Africa who do not have access to books and to this end, very cheap print runs are financed by Book Dash and its partners and the books are subsequently distributed free of charge to children from deprived backgrounds.
Having organized and run a workshop for three days and been so overwhelmed by the passion and commitment of the students and the quality of the work they produced, we wanted to do it again, and again – and again!!
It was with the warm glow of the workshop still upon us that we decided to set up our own association and contacted the students who had been involved in the workshop to see if they wanted to join us on our mission to organize further events. Eventually, ten students volunteered to help us set up the association, to start a blog and research partners and contexts for future events.
We are presently in collaboration with ‘Hackathon Memory’, an historical and literary weekend event held in places of historic interest, which aims to discover and collect local histories from local people and to keep memory of them. BookHoof saw this as a wonderful opportunity to collaborate and use those local stories as a basis for children’s story books and to organize workshops in parallel with Hackathon at the same site.
Our hope and aim is find more partners, more contexts and more venues where people can share their creative and literary talents for the highly worthwhile and fulfilling cause of providing literature to children who otherwise would have none.
So, we’ll keep you posted!
If you have any questions for us, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Donations are welcomed here:
