ABOUT

Pineapple Lane is a creative response to war and a recognition of the essential role that books play in providing escape, comfort and inspiration, while also being a useful tool for inspiring learning about language and culture. The project has its roots in Packed with Hope, a campaign that enabled Little Toller Books to deliver 10,000 book-filled backpacks to children still in Ukraine and those forced across borders into neighbouring Poland and Romania. With the help of 250 volunteers, the backpacks were filled over a single weekend with comforting and useful things like head torches, notepads, pencil cases, food, toothbrushes, puzzles, scarves, hope-filled cards from children in the UK and a copy of the dual-language, mother tongue book, How War Changed Rondo. It was this book, written by Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv, a husband-and-wife team from Lyiv whose livelihoods as writers and artists in Ukraine had been severely affected by the war, that made us realise how important access to books are in times of crisis, particularly for families who have been forced to leave their homes abruptly with very few possessions.

Since the war in Ukraine started, over 6 million people have fled. The UK Government has processed over 206,000 visas for Ukrainian refugees this year, the vast majority of them being women and children who have experienced terrible upheaval and loss. Being separated from family and friends, from communities and schools, from familiar people and places, means that the intangible threads of language and culture are also broken. Our aim with Pineapple Lane is to reconnect some of these broken threads by publishing beautiful picture books for children who have experienced the trauma of war. By giving them access to stories, often familiar folktales or cultural myths, we hope they’ll find some emotional comfort in reading or speaking in their mother tongue. Because each book will also be published in English, printed side-by-side, we want the books to also be useful and inspirational tools to encourage the exchange of language and culture in schools, with host families or among other community organisations that work with refugees.

We have also partnered with the British Library’s Living Knowledge network to make sure that we get copies of books into every library across the United Kingdom.
School in a Bag is a charity that has distributed school bags to over 50 counties and is an incredible grass roots organization. We will be working with them by offering up free books to go into their school, bags. These bags will be handed out via a huge network of partners in countries directly affected by war or disaster, countries such as Ukraine and Syria and beyond.
We are also working with many grass roots charities across all four nations making sure that books are handed out directly to children who have been resettled here in the UK.
In Ukraine where over 2.5 million children have been internally displaced because of the appalling war we will also be working with the local bookshop communities sending boxes of books  so they can hand out books to children close to the front line and to areas where children can no longer go to school.