Recently the Danish Ambassador signed a contract with Kim Dong publishing house which renews the agreement of Danish support to children’s literature in Vietnam with VND 8.5 billion (DKK 2,500,000) over the coming five years. The target group will be expanded to include 10-14 year old children.
Support to children’s literature is an important component in the Vietnamese-Danish development cooperation in culture with a budget of DKK 2,500,000 which is equivalent to VND 8.5 billion. The coming phase aims at creating innovative literature developed by Vietnamese authors and illustrators who tell stories of basic pluralistic values. No other media offer a child the possibility to be guided by an adult and to experience, learn and talk about the world at its own pace.
The development objective is to support children’s cultural development by creating innovative literature developed by Vietnamese authors and illustrators and furthermore give the children access to this literature though different channels. Various activities have been planned in order to reach this development goal. First, the good results from phase one will be repeated. This includes annual competitions, readers clubs and training of authors and illustrators. Secondly, the target group will be expanded and annual workshops will be conducted for Vietnamese writers/illustrators where focus is age group 4-10 and 10-14 years.
An interesting activity added to this component will be the use of TV to stimulate children’s interest in reading. Reading aloud is a very valuable way of stimulating the interest for reading in the early ages. The idea is to create a series of TV programmes where someone is reading aloud from a picture book while the camera captures the illustrations in the form of a small animation film produced by the Vietnamese writers and illustrators involved.
The previous phase has proved that the interaction between Vietnamese and Danish writers and illustrators is beneficial for developing stimulating children’s stories. The stories have been published both in Vietnam and Denmark and have furthermore received excellent reviews from the Danish library.
