The Gift

(Hardback)

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At first glance 'The Gift' is a simple visual tale of a cat helping his friend by bringing her food, a fish, which is his gift to her. As the story unfolds cat loses his friend and decides to go on a journey to find her and to give her his gift. During his journey he faces many trials and tribulations but eventually wins through and finds many unexpected gifts along the way. AUTHOR: Deb Gilmartin was born the UK and grew up loving science, art, books and animals. She has an MSc in Medical Entomology and spent nearly five years working as a Medical Entomologist in South Africa. While there she studied the biology of bedbugs and helped identify spiders, scorpions, ticks and lice. After emigrating to Australia Deb continued working as an Agricultural Entomologist in Qld, working with fruit fly and pests of stored grains. She then retrained as a high school science teacher and taught in Queensland Schools for 13 years before finally pursuing her other passion, art. ILLUSTRATOR: Deb regularly exhibits her work both in Australia and overseas and continues to practise as a fine artist and illustrator. Her first major solo exhibition, 'Tigers, Rotors and Blokes', was as a result of working as the artist in residence with Australian Aerospace to document the introduction of the new the Tiger ARH Helicopter to Australia. Her other successful joint exhibition, 'Feline Groovy', looked at all things to do with cats. She has been a finalist in several major prizes, including the Kedumba Drawing Award and the Hans Heysen Landscape Prize. Deb also teaches people how to draw. The Gift is her first children's book. SELLING POINTS: * A wordless picture book that allows for flexible classroom use -- children can tell the story in their own words; develop visual literacy skills; * Parents can tell their own story to go with the pictures, personalising it to suit their child * Beautiful, evocative water colour illustrations * Important gentle message about the value, and rewards, of friendship