The Ona bookshop in Barcelona hosted the presentation of This Book You’ll Never Finish, written by Gerard Coll-Planas and illustrated by Cristina Zafra, on Saturday, 21 February.
The book arises from an urgent question: how can we address inequalities in the classroom in a way that makes sense to children?
The story champions literature as a tool for sparking conversations with children that allow them to discuss the inequalities they face. In this sense, it champions reading as a space from which to imagine other possible worlds.
The presentation opened with a conversation moderated by Gerard Coll-Planas, the book’s author, with Virginia Cierco, director of the Sant Pau-Santa Creu Library, the writer Meritxell Martí and the illustrator Cristina Zafra, who all agreed to reject logic based on censorship or rewriting and instead champion conversation as an educational tool, each sharing experiences from their own situated perspectives.
The event also served as a platform to share the results of the Zoom Out project, from which the book draws, a project coordinated by the University of Vic. – University Central of Catalonia (UVic-UCC), which proposes reflecting on how children’s literature contributes to shaping children’s imaginaries and, at the same time, how it can be a tool for questioning inequalities.