The Sheridan College graduate had never given writing a thought. He didn’t know it could be a way to earn a living, surely not for an animation graduate. His career would lie in producing images for the movie industry.
“I had no idea. I thought anyone who (wrote for a living) lived in the countryside,” says the Canadian illustrator and acclaimed children’s author. “I didn’t think of it as a job.”
But somewhere in the back of his mind images and vague story lines began to percolate until at last he began to explore the idea of telling the stories dancing in his own head rather than helping realize someone else’s vision. He received encouragement and went back to his drawing board.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Klassen is now an internationally recognised writer and illustrator of picture books for children. His trilogy I Want My Hat Back, This Is Not My Hat and We Found a Hat took the picture book industry by storm. It sold millions of copies and is published in almost 30 languages. The New York Times Book Review named I Want my Hat Back one of the 10 Best Illustrated Children’s Books for 2011 and This Is Not My Hat became the first ever simultaneous winner of both the prestigious Caldecott Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal. Klassen was now firmly in the vanguard of the surge of very successful Canadian illustrators and picture book writers.
“It’s a really exciting time. There’s a lot of great Canadian work coming out,” he says.
In Klassen’s latest venture, The Rock From The Sky, he uses his dry wit and deadpan humour to create a picture book about an armadillo, a snake and a turtle trying to decide who has the best spot in a world that could literally be anywhere. But they are ignorant that a rock is falling from the sky. An alien even makes an appearance.
Told in five short chapters – and I mean short, thinking of all those parents facing a five-chapter book to read at bedtime – The Rock From The Sky is aimed at four to eight-year-olds. It offers a great deal; delightful oddball drawings of the animals, the plants, even the huge black rock, all with simplicity and depth intriguing to the adult reader. This is the book’s charm, mystery and for the adult reader, faint echoes of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
“There is no explicit message, it’s a story,” says Klassen. “I don’t tell you how to feel. I don’t pretend to know. I just tell you what (the characters) say.”
When he began The Rock From The Sky it was just one chapter, “but it didn’t have an ending I liked.” Lunching with a friend one day, it was suggested he add a couple more chapters. He did, with the result that he found the push and pull essential to any successful story.
Judging by the sales figures, the innate honesty in Klassen’s tales appeals to children who enjoy the story at the own level of their understanding – as do many adults.
“I just hope it’s fun and a surprise for the reader,” he says.
Klassen was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba and grew up in Niagara Falls and Toronto. He studied animation at Sheridan College, graduating in 2005 and now lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and two young children. He is 39.
The accolades have kept coming. In 2018, Klassen was awarded the Governor General’s Award for English Language children’s illustration for his work on the picture book Cats’ Night Out, written by Carolyn Stutson. In 2018, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, for his transformative contributions as an illustrator and author to children’s literature.
But this accomplished children’s author and illustrator has no intention of resting on his laurels and is considering for his next project to adapt a folk tale to his own unique – and very successful style.
