Alumni Spotlight
 | Duncan Weller, (BA '89) 2007 Governor General's Literary Awards in Children's LiteratureDuncan Weller’s The Boy from the Sun, with its striking mix of techniques, lures the unsuspecting reader away from a dark, gloomy and featureless industrial-urban milieu into a brilliantly coloured alternative world of light, colour and hope, which, in a twist in a pictorial narration, turns out to be the real world they were living in all along. This charming, fresh and joyful book perfectly melds story and image, to both deliver its message and form a thoroughly satisfying whole. In The Boy from the Sun, three sad children, sitting on a sidewalk, are shown the beauty of the world by a child with a glowing yellow head who drops out of the sky. He takes them on a journey through a fantastic forest and he leaves them in a state of serenity. The boy from the sun is primarily a celebration of the divintiy in nature, with the value of human life resonating throughout. There is also a mild criticism of aspects of ourselves. The story is presented as if drawn by a child, then it explodes with a child's imagination drawn with the technical abilities of an adult artist without the loss of the child's wonder and drive. Weller writes on his website, "I have counted over twenty possible signifying moments in my life as a child and as an adult that may have inspired the book. It seems that everything came together when I was receptive one morning. Sunlight burst through my bedroom window to wake me. I hopped out of bed and within ten minutes had the story and roughs sketched out." Congratulations Duncan!
Duncan Weller, Thunder Bay (ON), for The Boy from the Sun |
