Jerusalem Post movie critic and culture writer Hannah Brown this month won an Honor Prize in the Astra International Children’s Book Writing Contest for her book, Once Upon a Time… All Grownups Were Babies.
Prize winners in the contest come from the United States, China, Japan, Germany, Argentina, France, and Iran, and the judges were from Japan, China, the US, Austria, France, and Brazil. The contest is sponsored by leading publishers from around the world: Astra Publishing House in New York, minedition Switzerland and minedition France, Kodansha in Japan, and Thinkingdom in China. These publishers now have the option to publish the book. Brown is also the author of a novel, If I Could Tell You, and has published many short stories in Israel, the US, and the UK. She wrote Once Upon a Time for her son Danny, who is on the autism spectrum and who finds it very funny to see baby pictures of adults he knows. The book is about imagining adults such as firefighters, the president, teachers, and parents as babies, and shows that adults and children always have a little bit of the baby they once were in them.
