The Italian Author Gianni Rodari wrote many beloved children's books and was awarded the prestigious Andersen Prize. But he was also an educator of paramount importance in Italy and an activist who understood the liberating power of the imagination.

He is one of the twentieth century's greatest authors for children, and Italy's greatest. Influenced by French surrealism and linguistics, Rodari stressed the importance of poetic language, metaphor, made-up language, and play. At a time when schooling was all about factual knowledge, Rodari wrote The Grammar of Fantasy, a radically imaginative book about storytelling and play.

He was a forerunner of writing techniques such as the "fantastic binomial" and the utopian, world engendering "what if...." The relevance of Rodari's works today lies in his poetics of imagination, his humanist yet challenging approach to reality, and his themes, such as war and peace, immigration, injustice, inequality, and liberty. Forty years after his death, Rodari's writing is as powerful and innovative as ever. He died in Rome in 1980.

Beatrice Alemagna studied at the Graphic School in Urbino, Italy and began her career as a poster artist. She then went on to write and illustrate for children and has now published 30 books, which have been translated widely. Beatrice won the Andersen Prize in 2010 and has been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award four times; her picture book On a Magical Do-Nothing Day was voted by the New York Times as one of the ten best illustrated children's books of 2017 as well as being awarded the Golden Medal for Original Art by the Society of Illustrators. Beatrice is a native Italian now living in Paris.