Nahid Kazemi recently won her very first Governor-General’s (GGs) literary award for her work illustrating the children’s book The Sour Cherry Tree by Naseem Hrab, which is published by OwlKids.
The book tells the story of a little girl who deals with the death of her grandfather one day following his passing, and finds cherished memories of him by exploring his house, searching through some of his belongings and even remembering his fondness for his favorite kind of tea and the fig cookies they shared together. It’s a book that – through the eyes of a child — gives a heartfelt look at love, loss and a loved one’s memorable objects.
“Winning the Governor-General’s Award for the first time was so surreal for me. When the Canada Council called me to say I won the award, I was feeling so sad because I was crying over the news that a child was shot in Iran. So while one eye was tearing over that news, the other eye was feeling happy,” she said during a recent phone interview.
“The book was an amazing collaboration between myself, Naseem and Owlkids, because it was a good understanding and everything went the way we hoped it would,” she said. “The Sour Cherry Tree is a book about sharing love in silence, because the little girl and her grandfather don’t speak the same language.”
A resident of Montreal over the past eight years, Nahid is a multi-disciplinary artist and illustrator, who has worked on over 65 published children’s books such as Sharzad & The Angry King, Just Bea, and Teddy Let’s Go and has been nominated for the Astrid Lingren Memorial Award for her work.
And working in the world of children’s literature, she believes quite strongly that books have the power to convey important issues and messages to younger readers. “Life is full of love, death and so on, and are matters that we have to talk to kids about in a positive manner,” she said. “Books are a good way to describe these notions to kids.”
One of the things that Nahid enjoyed the most when she worked on the illustrations for The Sour Cherry Tree was that she shared the same kind of experiences with its author. “The story of the book comes from the heart that touches on real experiences, which means that life constantly changes from good to bad and bad to good, and from happy to sad events,” she said. “When I talked with Naseem, I found out we shared similar experiences, and when I started to work on the sketches, the end result became a story that combined both our experiences when we grew up in Iran.”
“In fact, whenever I look through the pages of The Sour Cherry Tree, it’s like I am looking at pieces of myself and my own life.”
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