The organizers first saw my book, "
Haltabees Haltabees" written by Rania Zaghir and published by
al khayat al saghir, in Bologna book fair, Italy where they discovered the book and invited me to participate in their International Children's and Youth Literature section.
Let me say i was honored to participate at the age of 25, with my first book, in this amazing festival next to brilliant illustrators and authors like
Shaun Tan,
Philippe Lechemier,
Emily Gravett, Eva Muggenthaler and many others.
The festival was extremely well organized and the amazing thing about it that i visited a lot of german schools, children's museums, libraries, and i was able in a short period of time to have a looot of wonderful souvenirs from this lovely capital Berlin.
i read my book for hundreds of kids living in Germany. the book was translated to german, but kids wanted to hear it in arabic and they enjoyed it :)
i did some stop motion workshops for some schools and i learned a lot from kids. some other schools did workshops based on my book before i met them and presented the work for me. it was overwhelming to see kids performing some plays based on Haltabees, or doing group illustrations using my style of illustration. some presentations were just funny like kids talking about how they imagined i look like after they saw the book :)
i had a lot of fun with those wonderful kids, with the authors and illustrators from the festival, with the organizers specially in the parties at the end of each day :)
i did a video that describes a bit what was happening :)
tx a looot for the amazing people i met; Ina, Katrin, Mahmoud, Claudia, Inga, Christina, Alex ....
