French illustrator and author Laëtitia Devernay recently won this year’s V&A Illustration Awards for her book, The Conductor. I have to confess, I had never heard of her before reading this roundup of winners, but I absolutely love her style. I’ve always been fascinated with children’s books, partially because I think it’s amazing how we present the world to kids, but also because the defining feature of children’s literature is mixing images and text. A truly great picture book is a piece of art. If you’re not on board with this statement, just take a trip to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art (I went last summer for work and ADORED it) and you’ll see what I mean.

Or maybe you wont. Which, that’s fine, but we probably wouldn’t be friends.

More pictures after the jump…

And here is her very charming, very French blog. And here is a link to the Amazon page for The Conductor.