«One day Enza came home and said, "Enough." She couldn't take it anymore—the materials she worked with every day, designed for children with learning difficulties or autism. "They deserve to walk into a bookstore and buy a beautiful book. A real book." That's where it all started.» And what was born from that moment is Uovonero, a publishing house that creates books for children and adolescents with and without difficulties, promoting a culture that sees richness in difference. We hear the story from Sante Bandirali, editor, writer, translator, and one of Uovonero's founders alongside Enza Crivelli and Lorenza Pozzo.
So it all began with recognizing a gap in the market…
The insight that beauty and aesthetic design matter—really matter—in books for children with difficulties: that was the original impulse. It took a couple of years before that became a serious intention, and another two before it became real. We studied, we built an editorial plan, we developed everything that came after, aware that we were filling a space the Italian publishing market had left empty. We launched with 3 titles the first year, 5 the second, then 7. Now we've settled into 10 to 12 titles annually.
These books are strikingly beautiful, but they also say profound things—and they say them well. Having a good idea isn't enough to write a good book. What guides you when you're telling stories about disability?
That there's a compelling story. That the novel is real literature. That the picture book has an artistic dimension. That the text is written with delicacy. And that disability, even when it's a crucial part of the story, is never deliberately spotlit as some heavy-handed "disability book" trying only to explain something—which usually results in something thin and didactic.
In Che bambino fortunato! (by Lawrence Schimel and Juan Camilo Mayorga, 2019), a younger brother introduces us to Davide, who has an extraordinary memory and is brilliant at inventing and telling stories. He also has the good fortune of being able to read even after his parents turn off the light. Because his wonderful playmate is blind.
Among all the manuscripts we receive, when I read "I've written a book about autism," I already know that opening it won't yield an interesting story. Disability shouldn't feel like a boulder dropped on the reader's head—when it does, the story collapses. The best example is probably The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd, which won the Andersen Prize in 2012: it's an extraordinary mystery—the kind, as Simonetta Agnello Hornby writes in the introduction, that keeps you awake all night. A boy boards the Ferris wheel; his cousins wait below, but when the pod opens, he's gone. There are vivid, powerful characters, like Ted, the narrator, who has Asperger syndrome. Asperger syndrome, incidentally, is never mentioned by name because this isn't a book about the syndrome—it's a brilliant mystery for young readers. Yet by the end, we've learned a great deal about Asperger syndrome without ever being lectured.
Your approach branches in many directions: you create books for children with difficulties, but also for children without difficulties to help them understand what's different about their peers. And you write for the adults—parents, teachers—who live and work with them.
I often use the metaphor of an egg. The yolk—the core of our editorial mission—is the inclusive picture books that use special communication codes (like symbols for augmentative and alternative communication). But even though these books are made for children who have reading difficulties, they're not books only for them. Every time, we also think about children who don't have reading difficulties, so the book remains genuinely accessible at the same level for everyone, shareable across an entire classroom. Then there's the white of the egg: literature that takes on these themes for classmates, for family members, for siblings, friends, neighbors. And finally the shell that holds it all together—our nonfiction series, I raggi, designed for educators, parents, and teachers. We created it because we wanted to bring Italian readers essays on autism that hadn't yet been translated. Among them is Olga Boddashina's Sensory Perceptual Issues in Autism and Asperger Syndrome, one of the key reference texts on autism right now.
At last: no special products for special children…
We've always seen the idea of "special books for special kids" as a kind of ghetto. Unfortunately, a lot of augmentative and alternative communication materials that exist out there make reading genuinely tedious and exhausting for children without difficulties, pushing them away from the text. We try to avoid that. In fact, we've reached the point of publishing high-readability narrative fiction without even labeling it as such. Una per i Murphy (2018) by Lydia Mullaly Hunt is a perfect example—and it just won the Strega Prize for children's literature. The fact that it's a high-readability book appears only in the colophon in tiny 8-point type. So no one says, "Look, a high-readability book won the Strega," they just say, "This book won." And yet if a dyslexic child picks it up, they'll find it far easier to read than a traditionally formatted book.
You've also shown concrete, intelligent attention to the disabled community during the long months of lockdown from COVID-19.
The #IntantoFaccioQualcosa initiative was our response to #IoRestoACasa. For more than three months, we posted over 350 activities—four a day—and the response was enormous: about 80,000 visits to the dedicated page on our website (in collaboration with Autismo è and Spazio Nautilus – Milano). That idea came from Enza Crivelli, who was thinking of autistic children who normally attend therapy centers but suddenly had to stay home.