November 2018: Meng Yanan 孟亚楠
This month we have a very special Book Club, featuring Meng Yanan, a Beijing-based children's author and illustrator, whose book Happy Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋节快乐 was the text for the fourth Bai Meigui Translation Competition. This year the competition was exclusively open to students in secondary education, and the judges were very impressed with the quality of the entries. The winner of the competition was Jasmine Alexander, a student at St. Paul's Girls' School in London, and we're delighted that her translation will be published by Balestier Press on November 15th (see here for more details). You can read more about Jasmine's experience in an interview on our blog, as part of our Talking Translation series.
Here's a bio of Meng Yanan, in Chinese and English, from Daylight Publishing House:
孟亚楠,生在北京,长在北京。小时候性格有些内向,不爱说话。可能是因为这样的缘故才喜欢画画,学会了用线条和色彩来表达思想与情感。
大学就读于北京服装学院视觉传达专业,毕业后继续在北京服装学院插画工作室读研,学习插画。
目前是学校的美术老师,喜欢跟孩子们玩在一起。在指导孩子们画画的同时,也在学习并创作图画书。
图画书作品《中秋节快乐》获第一届“青铜葵花图画书奖”金奖。
Meng Yanan was born and grew up in Beijing. She was rather introverted and quiet when she was young, which perhaps caused her love of painting. Lines and colours are tools for her to convey her emotions and thoughts.
She studied at Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology (BIFT) as an undergraduate student, majoring in visual communication. After graduation, she continued to study illustration at the BIFT Illustration Studio.
Meng currently works as an art teacher, and enjoys working with children. Whilst teaching children to draw, she also learns and creates picture books herself.
Her picture book Happy Mid-Autumn Festival won the gold prize in the 2016 Bronze and Sunflower Picture Book Awards.
(And you can read more about the book and the Bronze and Sunflower Picture Book Awards on the Chinese Books for Young Readers blog.)
Meng Yanan very kindly made an audio-recording of this story specially for the competition, so why not have a listen to the story in Chinese, before the book is released!
For more information about the Bai Meigui Translation Competition, please see our competition page here.
And for this month's text, we're very grateful to Daylight Publishing House for giving us permission to print the Chinese text of another of Meng Yanan's books - 好困好困的新年. You can read it here.