World Kid Lit regular contributor Clare Gaunt interviewed Colombian author and illustrator Jairo Buitrago, whose children’s books are regularly translated from Spanish into English by Elisa Amado.

by Clare Gaunt

Jairo Buitrago is one of Colombia’s biggest and most respected children’s authors. His work has been included in the White Ravens Catalogue, on the IBBY’s Honor List and as a Kirkus Best Book, and he has won numerous prizes across Latin America. Nevertheless, this gentle author describes his audience as “everyone who reads in secret on their own”.

Despite being a writer, Jairo has a very visual way of seeing the world. In fact, he says he’s generally happier in the company of illustrators than writers and describes himself as a “creator of stories for illustrated children’s books”.

His young protagonists are often seeing things for the first time, encountering the world that surrounds them. They often share the same kind of perspective as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, but Buitrago doesn’t use innocence as a mirror to reveal the wrongs of adult society, his characters are very much part of their society, not outsiders looking in. 

In his worlds, adults (and animals and narrators) take young heroes under their wing (El Edificio/Drawing Outdoors), and young people’s creativity can be the source of a major social evolution (Afterward, Everything Was Different). It’s not a question of becoming empowered, it’s a question of everyone paying attention and learning together. This feels like a comfortable, natural, familiar way to be.

Sidney Smith taught Buitrago the power of contemplation, of taking time to look at things, of poetry. While traveling as a child by car with his parents taught him to keep his eye on what’s actually there. He notes that anyone who has ever travelled by car in Colombia will know you can see all kinds of, often surreal, scenes through the window (partly due to the sheer variety of landscape – Colombia is one of the most geographically diverse countries in the world). This kind of real/unreal juxtaposition, enabled by those inside the vehicle moving past the lives of those outside the vehicle lies at the heart of his first book for middle-grade readers El Reencuentro con el Perro Perdido en el Invierno (available in Spanish from Alfaguara, via channels including Apple Books).

Jairo’s stories are grounded in reality. His main characters are always “ordinary people who cross a line and dare to look at the world differently”. And they do so in a way that’s instantly recognisable to modern kids.

It’s not so much that he’s exploring what it is to be an outsider (although some of his books such as Eloisa y los Bichos, which explores what it’s like to move to a new city, specifically do just that). It’s more that he “enjoys the company of children and writing books for kids allows him to feel free, and free from convention. These readers have a degree of absolute freedom and are allies in the quest for freedom”. 

Freedom can however be terrifying when you’re surrounded by a world you’re still learning to know. So, if you don’t happen to have a lion to walk with you, it can be comforting and inspirational to be in the company of an author who really looks at the world, and finds all kinds of ways to help you learn your way around. 

Some of the books by Jairo Buitrago has published in English:

About Clare Gaunt

Clare Gaunt is a published children’s book translator, thanks to Majestic Mountains and Majestic Oceans, both available from Welbeck. She works from Spanish and French into English. She lives in a small village on the Canal du Midi in the South of France where she has grown her first courgette and nearly killed a pomegranate tree. Home is with her daughter, her Spanish/Colombian partner, and a cat. She is a kindred spirit of all travellers. Clare wanted to be an artist and a doctor when she was little, which probably explains why she’s now a storyteller on behalf of picture books with soul. She can’t wait to go back to Colombia, which is like a thousand countries in one.