Wild Folk

Auteur

Jackie Morris is an author and illustrator. She lives in a small house beside the sea in Wales, with cats and dogs for company. The Lost Words, co-authored with Robert Macfarlane won the Kate Greenaway Medal 2019. In the same year she published The Unwinding with Unbound. In 2022 they released Jackie's first book of poetry Feather, Leaf, Bark & Stone and earlier this year Fox and Otter appeared - the start of an exciting new series of fold-out Accordion Books.

Tamsin Abbott has been creating painted stained glass panels from her Herefordshire home for over twenty years. Her work is inspired by the British landscape, folklore and fairytale. She is a member of the British Society of Master Glass Painters and has exhibited with them as well the Museum of British Folklore, the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, and many other UK galleries. Wild Folk is her first book as a stained glass illustrator.

Texte du rabat

Wild Folk comprises seven illustrated fables of transformation and power. The tales are neither new nor old. They are full of ‘wild folk’, shape-shifting spirits that carry the energy that connects all things.

In its pages you will meet selkies and salmon and Black Fox, as big as a wolf and so fast and cunning she drives the Lord of the Manor to madness and oblivion; the woman of flowers who is happier living as an owl; the boy who learns to feel the songs and stories of trees through his skin; Wayland, the smith who can hammer metal to such airy thinness he makes his own wings; and the great white raven, a bird so rare it awakens the king who sleeps beneath the stones of the wild west cliffs of Wales.

This a book made to be looked at and held (it might be the first time stained glass images have been created specifically to illustrate a book). Tamsin paints on glass, the most mysterious stone of all, used for centuries to tell stories to people who couldn’t read or write. A story painted on glass is something you can look at and look through, sometimes both at once.

It brings together Jackie’s words and Tamsin’s images, but the stories come from both. It is a true collaboration born out of friendship and hope. These are tales to make you see, listen and most of all feel the wild magic that links stone, tree, fox and star.