Top 100 best picture books from around the world announced

The international art platform dPICTUS has published a list of the 100 best picture books of 2023, which includes the Ukrainian silent book (a book without words) The Yellow Butterfly by Oleksandr Shatokhin. This was announced on the page of the Book Arsenal festival coordinator Yulia Kozlovets, a member of the jury.

“I am happy and honored to join the group of curators of the dPICTUS platform and to be involved in the formation of this year’s list of 100 most beautiful picture books from around the world, which will be presented throughout the year at the largest book fairs, the first of which is the Bologna Book Fair!” she emphasized.

The Yellow Butterfly by Oleksandr Shatokhin is a “silent book” about life after the war, a broken and limited war.

“The barbed wire at the beginning with the spider is an image of the restrictions and constraints and fear that war gives you. The war, like barbed wire, drives you into certain limits, restrictions, unfreedom. The butterflies represent what was before the war, like souls, like places that were destroyed by the war. The girl is Ukraine itself, the one who runs away and protests against restrictions and slavery. Meeting butterflies, free and bright despite everything, the girl realizes that life will go on, the freedom of a butterfly cannot be limited or destroyed…” the annotation reads.

The book was published by Staryi Lev Publishing House in 2022.