Andreas Tjernshaugen and Sigbjørn Lilleeng - Selected Title Authors
We are happy to present our selected title author Andreas Tjernshaugen. He has written Death-Defying Journeys: The Fantastic Tale of Migratory Birds That Fly Half-Way Around the World (original title: Fuglenes farlige ferd, den fantastiske fortellingen om trekkfuglene som flyr halve jorda rundt). The book is illustrated by Sigbjørn Lilleeng, and it is one of NORLA’s Selected Titles of the autumn 2024.
What is your book about?
The book is about bird migration, one of the strangest natural phenomena I know about. It is a non-fiction book for children, but one that is built around a very realistic story. The protagonist is a young osprey called Freddy. In the autumn, after emerging from his egg, he flies all the way from Norway to Senegal, via the Strait of Gibraltar. En route, we meet many of the other bird species that fly south in the autumn and fly north again in the spring. This applies, for example, to birds such as swallows and white wagtails. The book is also about European birds that fly in other directions – bluethroats that migrate to India and Pakistan, puffins that spend their winters far out in the open Atlantic, and Arctic terns that fly all the way to Antarctica. The book explains why these birds migrate, how they navigate, and what dangers they have to watch out for along the way. So Death-Defying Journeys is not only a book about animals and nature, it is of course also about geography. The book has beautiful maps!
What inspired you to write this book?
The conversations I had with children when I traveled around schools and libraries presenting my last children’s book, The Blue Whale. I noticed that a good number of these children were especially interested in questions about languages, countries and continents. One reason this came up was because I showed them the covers of the various translated editions of The Blue Whale. This was especially interesting for the children with relatives in other countries, and children whose parents had moved to Norway. There were lots of comments like “I’ve been there” or “I can speak Danish” or “My dad can speak Lithuanian” or “Is the book out in Arabic?” So I began to think about a slightly different nature book for children. One that shows how the nature of northern Europe is linked to the rest of the world, and how people from the Arctic to Sub-Saharan Africa come across the same birds – the very same individuals, in fact – and have different names for these species.
Read more
See full presentation of the book here
Read more about the author here
More about the illustrator here
See all NORLA’s Selected Titles for the autumn 2024 here
