★White Raven 2020
★Finalist at the Nami Island International Illustration Concours 2021, South Korea
★Finalist at the Golden Pinwheel Young Illustrator’s Award 2019, Shanghai
★dPICTUS Curated
★Included in the Sharjah Exhibition for Children’s Book Illustrations 2021
★Winner at the CBAM Awards 2020, India Runner-up in the Best Printed Children’s Book of the Year
★category at the Publishing Next Industry Awards 2020,India
★Shortlisted for Comic Con Book Awards 2021
★Shortlisted at Peek-a-Book Children’s Choice Awards 2019,India

The Middle is a story of a journey within a journey. A voracious reader, Azma, whose mind is full of questions as she reads, finds that the more books she consumes, the more the whys and hows in them consume her. One night, a torn scrap of paper floats into her room, carrying an incomplete line within its crinkles. She desperately searches for any missing words to complete the lonely phrase but failing at each attempt, she finally turns to writing her own beginning and end.

The pages of The Middle are filled with surreal creatures - formidable, terrifying, looming – and these represent the fears and doubts of a mind struggling to make sense of the worlds captured within those books that only partially satisfy her as a reader. Azma embarks on an incomplete journey, ready to create its origin and end, finally realising the answers to all her impossible questions can only come to her when she writes her own version of the story. It is only then that the haunting creatures begin to soften and harmlessly melt away into themselves.

Richa Jha’s lyrical prose and Eva Sanchez Gomez’s breathtaking visual poetry come together to narrate a tale that is both stunning and thought-provoking. For all the restless creative souls out there, The Middle presents an all-familiar trajectory of creating something new.

Author Biography

Richa Jha is an multi-award winning author of picturebooks. She is also the founder and publisher at Pickle Yolk Books, an independent publishing house for children’s picture books in English.

Eva Sánchez Gómez graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona and then she focused on illustration in “Escola Francesca Bonnemaison” at the “Diputació de Barcelona”. There she started her professional career seeking her own visual language where the pencil, watercolor and a descriptive and sometimes nostalgic perspective are, at least for now, the protagonists. Tender, grumpy, ironic or disturbing characters go through the stories all along this learning process. Since then she has illustrated several novels and picture books from different countries and her works has been showed in quite a few collective exhibitions and Art markets around the world.