Kate Wakeling and Elīna Brasliņa performance

Kate Wakeling is a poet who writes for both children and adults. Her debut collection of children’s poetry, Moon Juice (The Emma Press) is illustrated by Elīna Brasliņa, won the 2017 CLiPPA and was nominated for the 2018 CILIP Carnegie Medal. Kate’s second collection for children, Cloud Soup, came out in 2021. Kate studied music at university and often collaborates with musicians, including as writer-in-residence for Aurora Orchestra. She loves writing scripts for musical performances, and her work has featured at the Southbank Centre, the Barbican, Kings Place and on BBC Radio 3.

Elīna Brasliņa is an illustrator and artist from Latvia. She studied printmaking at the Art Academy of Latvia, and discovered her love of book illustration there. She has worked on close to 30 titles, most of them children’s books by Latvian authors. She made her international debut by illustrating Kate Wakeling's collection of poems, Moon Juice (published by The Emma Press). Elīna enjoys playing around with styles and techniques, and even when she works digitally, she almost always incorporates scanned textures to give her work a more hand-drawn feeling. She lives in Riga with her husband, her daughter and their dog Bonnie.