Once I Was a Giant, by Melbourne-based author and illustrator Zeno Sworder, is the winner of the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Children’s Literature.
This visually astonishing book begins with a picture-book maker sitting frozen “in a concrete box where the light buzzes but nothing grows”, having run out of ideas.
Suddenly his pencil speaks up. “When I say a small ‘hello’ he almost falls out of his chair. I explain that I have a story to tell. He stares at me, then he pinches himself, then he thinks.”
Thus we get to know the pencil’s past as a giant tree, having grown from a seed and experienced all the wonderful changes that took place in her forest. From the sunshine to the starlights, from the birds chirping upon her branches to the insects living among her barks and roots, the tree had seen it all.
For she was the forest. She was a home.
She also offered shelter to a tiny wanderer, and they soon became the best friends. However, when the machines came and took the tree away, shaping her “into a thousand and one different things”, the wanderer started searching…
This is a deeply moving story, its words simple but subtle, its imaginary soft, quiet, dreamy yet expressive, conveying a sense of nostalgia and yearning for something that was once beautiful and innocent. The only monotone drawing in the book reveals a devastated landscape where all the trees have been chopped down and cleared away. It almost hurts looking at it.
But, without this image, it would be hard to appreciate the importance of reforestation.
Renowned Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran once wrote: “Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky. We fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness.” There is a reason why the protagonist in Italo Calvino’s 1957 novel The Baron in the Trees retires to the trees and vows never to come down again:
“Cosimo, in his yearning to enjoy fully that different green and the different light that shone through it, and the different silence, hung head down from the highest tree, and the upside-down garden became a forest, a forest not of the earth, a new world.”
Indeed, trees offer us a new perspective, that all things in nature are deeply connected, especially those outside of our known, human world. With this book, the author helps us understand the concept of inter-connection and non-separation: “Life is intertwined. We can breathe in because trees breathe out.”
The ending of the book is almost magical, in the same way that life itself is full of practical, realistic magic that we witness everyday – a seed germinates, an egg hatches, and a butterfly emerges from its cocoon. A pencil in an artist’s hand can tell the most amazing story. A tree can transform into books that transport us to other worlds.
Highly recommended.
Note: This book review was originally titled “A story about connection” and published under the title “Story about connection” by Ranges Trader Star Mail, March 24, 2026, P.24.
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 