Selection - FNLIJ

10
Four decades ago, five stars were born in the
realm of Brazilian Children and Young People’s
Literature
1969 – a milestone in Brazil’s Children and Young
People’s Literature
Four decades ago, five authors wrote their first stories for children,
and thus ushered a new phase for children and young people’s
literature in Brazil, which has been bearing fruit to date. Editorial
growth in this segment has been such that 424 titles were published
in 1974 whereas 4,957 titles were published in 2008, according to a
study commissioned by the Brazilian Chamber of Books to São Paulo
University’s Economic Research Institute Foundation (FIPE/USP).
All along the 1970’s, as these authors consolidated their careers and
new ones came into the scene, a road was paved for initially national
and then international recognition of Brazilian writers and illustrators
and the quality, as well as the originality, of their work.
Ana Maria Machado, Joel Rufino dos Santos, João Carlos Marinho,
Ruth Rocha, and Ziraldo were the 5 stars who shone in Brazilian skies
back in 1969. They were then the pioneers of what would become,
later in the 1980’s, the children and young people’s literature boom
in Brazil, with IBBY Hans Christian Andersen prize being awarded
to Lygia Bojunga in 1982 and the Ciranda de Livros being developed
by FNLIJ in the same year, which inaugurated the distribution of
literature books in Brazilian public schools and also inspired the
government to create the Reading Room Project for the purpose of
procuring those books.
In 1969, during the military dictatorship, the year when the first man
stepped on the moon and the first color TV broadcast was made in
Brazil, Ziraldo`s Flicts books and João Carlos Marinho`s O Gênio
do Crime came into existence, in addition to the early children and
young people’s texts by Ruth Rocha, Ana Maria Machado, and Joel
Rufino dos Santos, in Revista Recreio. These accomplished writers
have, after Monteiro Lobato, managed to creatively enhance the
imagination of children and youth.