Spread across a sprawling 17th-century industrial complex in London’s Clerkenwell, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, which opens next month, is being billed as the largest institution of its kind anywhere in the world: a permanent national home for an art form that shapes everything from children’s books and political cartoons to animation, fashion, advertising and digital culture. Part museum, part gallery and part creative laboratory, the centre represents an extraordinary attempt to drag illustration out of the margins and finally place it at the heart of British cultural life.

Eventually the centre will become home to Blake’s own enormous archive: 40,000 drawings created by one of the UK’s best-known and most immediately recognisable artists. Now 93, Blake has spent three-quarters of a century bringing the words of some of our most beloved authors to life. Roald Dahl is the big one, of course – it’s impossible to think of Dahl without seeing Blake’s energetic, dip-pen pictures – but the list also includes Michael Rosen, John Yeoman, Sylvia Plath and Voltaire, as well as Blake’s own books. In other words, it’s difficult to find anyone with the same authority.

“More needs to be done to recognise the importance of all illustration as an art form,” Blake explains. “What is particularly wonderful about it is that it’s a language everybody understands.”

For years, illustrators have been overlooked, seen as people who come in and do the decorating after the house has been built. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. When you think of The Twits, the likelihood is that you think of Blake’s wild, scratchy depictions. To imagine Funnybones is to see Janet Ahlberg’s deceptively simplistic pictures before Allan Ahlberg’s words. Go on any of Forestry England’s Gruffalo walks and it will be Axel Scheffler’s designs (rather than Julia Donaldson’s text) that loom out at you from between the trees.

“We are a bit in the shadow,” says Scheffler. “Our books are called picture books, so we are an important part of the process. It’s a very underestimated art form, the author and illustrator creating something together. It’s hard to separate.”

“The shortest time I’ve ever spent writing a picture book was an hour, typing it into my phone on an aeroplane,” says author-illustrator Sarah McIntyre, “but they always take at least three or four months of intensive work to illustrate, nine or more hours a day, six days a week.”

McIntyre has done more than most to highlight how badly illustrators are overlooked. A decade ago she launched the Pictures Mean Business campaign, to push for illustrators to receive proper credit for their work. In doing so, she helped to resolve a misunderstanding of what a picture book actually is.

Having written them myself, I know how completely specific they are. Almost always 32 pages long, and almost always read to a child by a caregiver before they can read themselves, most picture books exist at the precise point where the text and illustration meet. Remove either component and the whole thing falls apart.

“I think illustrating a story is one of the primal human instincts,” says Huw Aaron, whose book Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob won the Waterstones children’s book prize this year. “We don’t know if people were dancing or singing 40,000 years ago, but we do know they were making comics about people chasing cows, because they’re all over cave walls.”

The things an illustrator can do to a text are as varied as they are wonderful. Jim Field, illustrator of Kes Gray’s Oi Frog! and Rachel Bright’s The Lion Inside, sees illustration as an extra layer. “I’m not trying to do exactly what the words are saying,” he says. “I’m trying to weave in sort of extra subplots or let the reader learn more about the character.”

Matty Long, creator of Super Happy Magic Forest – a series that has crossed from picture books to chapter books to television – puts it even more bluntly. “If the words are just describing the picture, then why have you got the words?” he says. “I want the images to do the bulk of the storytelling.”

But sometimes an illustrator can go even further than this. In I Want My Hat Back, Jon Klassen performs the magic trick of telling two different stories at once. Read without images, the book is simply the tale of a bear fruitlessly inquiring after his lost headwear. But the illustrations provide a context that runs slightly counter to this. The bear, so polite written down, is actually fuelled by murderous revenge.

“It seems to be where the truth of the thing should live,” says Klassen of the tension between words and pictures. “I usually end up putting a half truth in the words, or leaving a lot of things out. I think that helps with kids because, when the text is outright incorrect, they can see that the pictures are telling the truth.”

Long before a child has gained the ability to decode the written word, they have already learned plenty about the world visually. “I saw Quentin Blake talk about visual literacy, and he brilliantly illustrated this,” explains Ed Vere, creator of Waffles & Julius and an illustrator who has spent years working with teachers through his Power of Pictures programme. “He asked some children what ‘indignant’ meant. Of course, nobody knew. And then he quickly drew this indignant old lady, and every child exactly understood. It wasn’t just ‘angry’ or one of those black-and-white emotions. They all got the subtleties from his drawing.”

For Sophy Henn, creator of the Happy Hills series, this is why the notion that picture books are merely a stepping stone to “proper” books is so wrong. By getting two streams of information, she says that “you’re learning emotional awareness, you’re learning empathy, you’re learning to be critical. In the world we live in today, that is incredibly important. I wish there was more information out there to say that picture books are actually a more complex form of reading.”

“Children have got the most sophisticated little minds,” says Lauren Child, creator of Charlie and Lola. “They might be tiny, but they’re really big thinkers. They’re so visually smart in ways that adults aren’t. We use visual cues and aesthetics our whole life, but we lose that edge that we have when we first arrive.”

A picture book might be the first time a child is able to identify and name a big emotion they are experiencing. Nadia Shireen’s book Barbara Throws a Wobbler uses bright and colourful images to depict feelings outside the written word. “We have a period in the book where Barbara actually talks to the Wobbler, and it all got very metaphysical,” she says. “I had to say to my editor: ‘Is this mad? Are we expecting three-year-olds to go on a psychological journey?’”

Sometimes, illustration can even help a book become a tool for storytelling, allowing children to become co-authors. In Jon Burgerman’s Splat!, for example, readers get to blast the protagonist in the face with various new and disgusting objects with every page turn. “I wanted to make a book that could only be a book,” says Burgerman. “I really celebrated the form of a picture book, and I wanted to make something that couldn’t be realised in any other form.”

Meanwhile, Is This a Plum? by Dan Ojari and his son Finn makes clever use of cutouts to hide objects in plain sight. “Someone sent me a video of their kid, who can’t read, and they are telling the story to their parents because the words are so simple,” Ojari says. “It has that feeling of ‘I know more than my parent, and I’m going to trick them.’”If all this makes picture book illustration sound rather grand, the process itself often begins in the least grand way imaginable: with a doodle. “The drawing has to come first,” says Long, holding up an early sketch of a Super Happy Magic Forest character that, even in its nascent stage, still manages to contain all the elements of the character’s core personality. “I have to convince myself that there’s an idea there worth pursuing, and I do that through the drawing.”

Sue Hendra does the same, showing me her first sketch of the character Supertato, which she created with Paul Linnet and spun off into a mini empire consisting of 15 books and counting. Her sketch depicts a potato flying above a city. Unsure of writing a book about what appears to be an apocalyptically large spud, the sketch taught them that they needed to reframe Supertato’s world. “Paul suggested a supermarket, because it’s a city in miniature with products from all over the world coming in. It just created this lovely boundary, which felt really safe and secure.”

“If I had my notebook I’d show you the first picture of Hiccup that I drew 30 years ago,” says Cressida Cowell, author and illustrator of the How to Train Your Dragon series. “It was of this little Viking trying to live up to his father. That was the very first germ of something that spawned 12 books, a movie series and a theme park. Just a little pencil drawing!”

Characters are also everything for Jamie Smart, whose Bunny vs Monkey books sit at the heart of the current comic book boom in publishing. Their appeal is vast, and much of this is to do with how replicable the characters are. “When I do workshops for kids, I always start at the very beginning. I go: ‘Draw a square and draw a circle, and now you can pretty much draw any character in Bunny vs Monkey,’” he says. “For a child, telling stories can be quite intimidating, because you have to know all the words that you’re going to need. But if you can tell a story with a couple of lines and a smiley face, what a gift.”

Arguably nobody knows this better than Rob Biddulph, whose Draw With Rob videos – teaching children step by step to replicate his artwork – elevated him to national treasure status during lockdown. “I think it’s the thing I’m proudest of in my career,” he says. “Sure, it was on a screen, but you can use that screen to do something practical and physical. Kids were watching me on YouTube, but they were actually doing something on a piece of paper that they could then stick up on the fridge.”

If picture books ask a lot of children, they also often demand an unusual act of trust from the adults who create them. “I think an author and an illustrator need to share a similar sense of things, a sense of humour, a sense of drama,” says Blake. “But it is better if their views of things are not exactly the same; one needs to complement the other.”

When illustrating someone else’s work, the first thing Blake does is scrutinise the manuscript. “First of all, I need to get to know the characters as well as possible and imagine what they look like,” he says. “After that, it’s a question of finding suitable moments that will attract the reader but not anticipate the writer. For instance, there is one dramatic moment in Roald Dahl’s Matilda where the dreadful Miss Trunchbull hits Bruce Bogtrotter over the head with a plate. I showed her raising the plate in the air over the unfortunate boy, leaving the dramatic conclusion to Roald himself.”

This is a skill in itself. Maxwell Oginni illustrated My Rice Is Best, which was published last year and picked up a glut of award nominations. However, he comes from an animation background, where every I can’t speak for other authors, but the moment I first receive artwork from my illustrators (Nicola Slater for picture books, Vincent Batignole for chapter books) is often the moment where a story starts to feel more like a book. Both of them delight in adding background details – shopfronts, references, unimpressed background characters – that give the stories a richness they would otherwise lack. And they still surprise. “I love to add references to my favourite films, video games or manga,” says Batignole. “Plus I think there’s at least one Spice Girls reference in every book I’ve ever worked on.” This, it’s fair to say, is news to me.

“I don’t tell anyone about this, but I create a backstory for every character,” reveals Slater. “It might have no bearing on the story, but it helps to set the scene and their motivations, and it informs the way the book goes.”

“The best children’s writers know that they can leave lots of things to the illustrator,” explains Nick Sharratt, who has illustrated books for Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Rosen and Julia Donaldson. “Sometimes you’ve got to let the pictures do their job.”

A much more high-stakes author-illustrator relationship is the one that exists between Lydia Corry and Sally Gardner. This is because Gardner is Corry’s mum. Although they worked together on the gorgeous Tindims series, it wasn’t always the case. “When I was a lot younger I illustrated a tiny picture on the front of her book I, Coriander, and she really didn’t like it,” Corry says. “Now she has the painting in her house, but she was so attached to the story, and the visual thing was all in her head. So you do get nervous about whether or not it’s what the author wants.”

One way to assuage these nerves is to do everything yourself. There are no end of authors who illustrate their own work, allowing them a level of control over the finished product that the rest of us will never experience.

Best known for his Bunny v Monkey series, Jamie Smart loves that this approach leaves less space for reader misinterpretation, especially when making a comic. “I’m literally saying: ‘Here is this character, here is this joke, here is this bit of story,’ and it’s all laid out for you to see,” he says.

But even author-illustrators have their limits of control. “When you publish a book, you are giving it up completely,” says Debi Gliori, creator of classics including No Matter What. “You can’t stand behind people and go, ‘I think you should slow down,’ or ‘I think you should read that bit in a squeaky voice.’” Although illustrations can be used to almost any end, nearly everyone I speak to returns, sooner or later, to the same essential quality: joy. “I am very serious about being silly,” says Hendra, seriously. “Humour is so underestimated, especially for children. But if you arm a child with a love of being silly, it’s like a survival skill.” And this is a theme that runs across many of the illustrators I spoke to. Sarah Horne, who has illustrated books for Sam Copeland and Gianna Pollero, sees her job as “getting some silliness and joy into books”, while Smart’s wild energy makes him want to “stretch all the characters out and push them out of the panels”. McIntyre says that one of the most talked about details in her Adventuremice books is a picture of a character “sitting on the toilet, with a tiny poo floating into space. That doesn’t really need words.”

But even silliness takes craft. When Sue Hendra is finished with a book she will read it over and over from different viewpoints – a child, a teacher, a knackered parent – to make sure the rhythm is correct. Lauren Child tinkers with her books right up until her deadline. “I’ve just delivered a picture book, and we were still taking words out right up until the last minute,” she says.

Rob Biddulph does the same, removing any words that the pictures can communicate more clearly. “I write the story as a poem, so the tendency is to put everything that you want to happen in that story into the verse,” he says. “But an illustration will get the exact intention of the story across. Pictures paint a thousand words, as they say.”

The opening of the Quentin Blake Centre is a great indication that we have come a long way in recognising our incredible history of illustration, and the mountains of talent we have produced. But there is still a way to go. “Did you know that, unlike writers, illustrators still have no easily accessible sales data?” asks McIntyre. “While Julia Donaldson is a quantifiably bestselling author, Axel Scheffler doesn’t have any numbers for their books together. He doesn’t carry any of that sales data with him. This has a huge trickle-down effect on how illustrators are perceived.”

One thing that resonated throughout these interviews was how much of a privilege it is to be able to create books for children. For some illustrators, it offers an opportunity to tap back into the memory of bedtime stories with their children. For others, it’s the thrill of seeing a book that has been worn out through sheer use. Some view illustration as an intellectual challenge, others as a way of providing clarity on the state of the world. But all of them agreed on one thing: underestimate children at your peril.

The last question I ask Blake is why characters made for children have the potential to stick in the public consciousness for decades. “We feel we can relate to them,” he answers. “In a sense, they become our friends.”

An Australian publishing house has cancelled the publication of a children’s book by an award-winning Indigenous poet over comments the book’s illustrator made about the victims of the Bondi beach terror attack, whom he called “affluent beneficiaries of imperialism”.

University of Queensland said on Wednesday its publishing house would not proceed with the publication of Bila, A River Cycle, written by Jazz Money and illustrated by Matt Chun, and was considering “recycling options” for already printed copies.

The university said the decision was due to comments Chun made in an online article that “do not align with the University’s policies and values including in light of its adopted definition of antisemitism”.

In response to the decision – first reported on the independent news site Lamestream – several authors said they would terminate their contracts or refuse to work with the Brisbane publisher in future, but the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies welcomed the move, saying the university had taken a stand against “hate, vitriol and grotesque propaganda”.

Those authors include the Goorie and Koori poet Evelyn Araluen, the high-profile Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah and the award-winning First Nations author Melissa Lucashenko, who called the move an “egregious decision”.

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In January, University of Queensland Press paused publishing the book – described as “a lyrical journey through Country” which tells the story of a river that takes on human form – while it considered Chun’s comments.

Chun published a Substack post titled “We don’t mourn fascists” on 1 January about the Bondi beach attack, deploring what he called the “liberal capitulation” to the “Zionist framing” that “violence that impacts the affluent beneficiaries and perpetrators of imperialism is deserving of special attention, elaborate memorials, rolling media coverage, and international headlines”.

New South Wales police confirmed on Thursday that the Engagement and Hate Crime Unit was investigating Chun’s post.

“Whiteness, Jewishness, and the backdrop of Bondi Beach were enough to bestow every person killed with default innocence and virtue,” Chun wrote. “White, Jewish settler victimhood demands exceptional, heightened grief.

“‘We don’t mourn fascists’ has been a popular refrain from the Australian left. How quickly this slogan is discarded when the idyll of colonial Bondi is ruptured.”

Fifteen people were killed in the terror attack on 14 December, including a child aged 10.

The president of the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies, Jason Steinberg, commended UQP’s move.

“Publishing a book, no matter the topic, whose illustrator [expresses views such as Chun’s] would be unacceptable,” he said.

“It is exactly these types of sentiments expressed by a range of individuals that have enabled hate and falsehoods to fester in Australia. This creates a putrid environment for the worst terrorist attack to occur on Australian shores, specifically targeting Jewish Australians.”

Chun told Guardian Australia – which he referred to as a “liberal-imperialist” publication in his post – that he stood by “every word” of the article, “which was deeply considered and written in close consultation with Jewish comrades”.

“It will stand the test of history,” he wrote in an email. “UQP have capitulated to Zionist lobbyism and sustained pressure from pro-Israel media. We should be both disgusted and unsurprised by this.”

In January The Australian described Chun’s comments as a “tirade against Jews and Zionists”.

The bookseller Dymocks pulled other works by Chun from its shelves in January.

Money said she believed thousands of copies of Bila, A River Cycle had been printed. She said Wednesday’s decision would damage her financially and reputationally, but she was most concerned about the “really disturbing precedent it set”.

“It sucks for me that my book is getting cancelled,” she said. “But the thing to me that is most pressing about this whole story is the precedent that this sets: that even a kids’ book about a river written by an Aboriginal person on Aboriginal land can be destroyed because of a right wing media campaign.”

A UQ spokesperson denied the university was “pulping” Money’s book, saying “the books remain in storage while the University considers recycling options”.

“The University regrets the impact this matter has on … Jazz Money,” the spokesperson said. “We have enormous respect for Jazz and her work and we would welcome the opportunity to work with Jazz again in the future.”

But Money said she no longer trusted the publisher she has worked with since 2020, when she won the David Unaipon award for an emerging Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander writer.

The poet said the publisher’s reason for cancelling the book which they had worked on for about five years was “disingenuous” as Bila had “not got anything to do with antisemitism or Israel or Palestine”.

“The book is about a river,” she said. “It’s a beautiful book that is so gentle and lovely – and it wasn’t written by Matt. It was written by me.”

Lucashenko, the author of ​​the multi-award-winning novel Edenglassie, said she was getting legal advice about her upcoming book Blood on the Tiles, which is set to be published by UQP next year.

“It is not only silencing an Indigenous author, it’s caving in to the Murdoch press,” said the First Nations writer, who has been working with the publishing house for 30 years. “And it makes me want to put an ancestral curse on the lot of them.”

Araluen said she had written to UQP on Wednesday, saying its “shameful and abhorrent decision to pulp the work of a fellow Aboriginal storyteller without due process, communication, respect or consideration” had caused her to terminate of her relationship with the publisher immediately.

She told Guardian Australia that would involve rescinding a contract on an upcoming nonfiction book and paying back a $2,500 advance.

“For these books to be pulped is so egregiously culturally violent and wasteful and disrespectful and has absolutely demonstrated that the University of Queensland Press does not see our writers and our stories as people or as living things, that one has to be responsible to, but actually just sees us as commodities,” she said.

Abdel-Fattah said UQP had “chosen to indulge a coordinated outrage campaign designed to intimidate, delegitimise, and chill dissent”, saying that as a result Discipline would be her “first and last book with them”.

Other writers to terminate their relationship with the publisher on Wednesday included Natalia Figueroa Barroso and Sara M Saleh.

In an essay that accompanied the 2021 exhibit “Speechless: The Art of Wordless Picture Books,” at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, the children’s-book author David Wiesner laid down milestones for the genre to which “Bunny & Tree” belongs. Wiesner started with “What Whiskers Did,” by Ruth Carroll, from 1932, a joyous work of black-crayon pointillism that was, according to Wiesner, “the first completely wordless picture book published in the United States”—and, oddly, the only one for some thirty years. Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” from 1963, was a second inflection point, owing to its “three consecutive wordless double-page spreads that encompass the Wild Rumpus and that exposed millions of readers to the idea of ‘wordlessness.’ ” A third, Wiesner wrote, was Peter Spier’s “Noah’s Ark,” from 1978, the first wordless picture book to win the Caldecott Medal, the highest American honor for a children’s-book illustrator.

“Bunny & Tree” is a wordless milestone, too, for its sheer length—it’s a grandly capacious, generous book about grand and capacious generosity. And as a title from Enchanted Lion Books, the independent children’s publisher, it’s part of a rich lineage. Enchanted Lion is a champion of the wordless format, dating back to its Stories Without Words series, from a decade ago, which includes Gaëtan Dorémus’s “Bear Despair” (2012), about a bear who will eat anyone who dares to steal his lovey, and “Fox’s Garden” (2014), by Camille Garoche (working under her enviable pen name, Princesse Camcam), about a boy who finds a surprise family in his back yard. Although based in Brooklyn, Enchanted Lion happens to have a deep bench of wordless books by French illustrators—none of which, of course, require much translation—such as Blexbolex’s tapestry-like “Vacation” (2017) and Olivier Tallec’s “Waterloo & Trafalgar” (2012), about a pair of stout, obstinate sentries who are able to resolve their differences with the intervention of a budgie. Whereas the soldiers in “Waterloo & Trafalgar” are named for two sites of French defeat, my daughter used to act out extended arguments between them in an English-ish accent she apparently picked up from repeat viewings of “A Hard Day’s Night.”

An illustration from “Vacation.”Art work by Blexbolex / Courtesy Enchanted Lion Books

The Stories Without Words series also includes two books featuring Arthur Geisert’s industrious, mechanically ingenious pigs, “Ice” (2011) and “The Giant Seed” (2012), which take the same pleasures in how things work as some of Richard Scarry’s most intricate illustrations—as if you stripped the text out of “What Do People Do All Day?” and put the pigs in charge. The casts of “Ice” and “The Giant Seed” represent an anthropomorphized evolution of the pigs in one of Geisert’s earlier books, “Oink” (1991), whose title contains an entire language in a single syllable—depending on the context, “oink” can mean “good morning” or “follow me” or “yum.” “Oink” also demonstrates that not all wordless books are literally so. Tomie dePaola’s “Pancakes for Breakfast” (1978), for another example, writes out its pancake recipe and clearly labels its bags of flour and jugs of syrup. Other authors make exceptions, as Geisert does, for animal onomatopoeia, as in Jerry Pinkney’s “The Lion & the Mouse” (2009), wherein an owl “Screeeeches,” the lion “GRRRs,” and the mice “Squeak Squeak Squeaks”; or Matthew Cordell’s “Wolf in the Snow” (2017), which is replete with “barks,” “whines,” and “HOOWWWLLs.”

By excluding what readers might otherwise assume to be a main ingredient, the wordless picture book heightens the flavors of what remains. Whenever I’ve read these books with my kids, I’ve noticed how they (and I) become more attuned to all the other decisions an artist is making about shapes and color palettes, panels and negative space. In Suzy Lee’s “Wave” (2008), about a little girl at a beach who is trying to reach détente with the tide, there’s a key moment (about two-thirds through) when the backdrop flips from white to blue; when my daughter read the book for the first time, the color swap delivered the same jolt as a climactic plot twist. In many of these books, wordlessness seems to grant a freedom of movement to the artist, as in the bold, slashing blacks and drip-painting explosions of ocean in “Wave,” or in the scrawly and snow-blind vistas of Cordell’s “Wolf in the Snow.” Shrugging off language seems to nudge some artists into Impressionist realms; their images vibrate with bodies and emotions on the go. This kinetic energy hums along in Chris Raschka’s “A Ball for Daisy” (2011), in which thick, squiggly lines of ink, watercolor, and gouache keep Daisy, an expressive little dog, in constant wagging motion, while her beloved red ball takes on the gravitas of Wilson in “Cast Away.”

Many of the best wordless picture books pursue an idea of the purest simplicity: the wave is big, the ball is lost, the wolf is scary (or lost). But Wiesner and another of the format’s greatest practitioners, Barbara Lehman, eschew text even while chasing conceptual feats that might seem to require verbal explication. In Lehman’s “The Red Book” (2004), perhaps the only Caldecott winner to share DNA with the music video for a-ha’s “Take On Me,” a girl in a city finds a book about a boy on a beach, and the boy on the beach finds a book about the girl in the city; they are reading each other, and the red book continues to write itself even after one of the kids parachutes out of one narrative framework and into the other. Wiesner’s “Flotsam” (2006), a spiritual cousin to “The Red Book,” achieves a similar infinite-mirror virtuosity through more elaborate means. A boy finds a camera, washed up on a beach, containing a roll of film that opens two portals: one that unlocks a secret undersea world (gigantic robot fish, island-size starfish), another that rewinds through time (with pictures of all the children who have found the camera, for the past century or more).

Wordless picture books are more mutable than their written-out peers; you can edit and polish the narrative over repeat readings, which are never the same twice. Even when they are not attempting anything like the imaginative gymnastics of “Flotsam,” these books demand more of adults as readers and as caregivers—more collaboration and improvisation, more engagement. Lighting up a kid’s circuit boards in these ways is objectively good, but, by evening story time, parents might just want to zone out with a familiar text; as Matthew Cordell has said, “It’s bedtime, and it’s late, and a grownup doesn’t want to be creative.” It’s embarrassing to admit that, when my daughter was little, I sometimes felt unequal to the task of her favorite wordless picture books, such as Peggy Rathmann’s “Good Night, Gorilla” (1994), in which the title character steals an oblivious zookeeper’s keys and unlocks the cages of all his animal neighbors. But, almost invariably, after a couple of pages, my tired and aged brain would lock into gear with the project; instead of pressing the Autopilot button, the book would activate something like a beginner-level flow state, as my daughter and I moseyed through the illustrations and constructed the story together.