He has worked in illustration for twenty years and in 2011 won the Greenaway Medal for his inspiring tale of fatherhood, FARTHER .

A young boy watches his father get so involved with his work, trying to make an invention to fly, that time spent with him is limited. A young boy, bewitched by his fathers unrelenting passion to fly; a desperate craving that absorbs his every waking minute, finds himself entranced by the dream. It continues by exploring the text through a range of activities that include explicit grammar teaching, opportunities for shorter written outcomes and book talk. I would recommend this book for year 4 literacy classes and I would say it would be an excellent text to use in a creative writing class. Although it doesn’t contain a lot of text, the words are beautifully woven into the pictures using different fonts and text sizes.Themes such as war, love, death and dreams could all be discussed as a class and the book deals with each of these very sensitively which justifies the recommended reading age of 5+. For many books these two points would cause me to only give a single star rating, so the fact I still rate this at 4 stars say something about how good it is.

And why not try older children and use it as a source for a discussion - about families, about dreams and growing up, about loss, about poetry, about art. This stunning picture book by significant author Grahame Baker-Smith won the Kate Greenaway medal in 2011 and explores the relationship between a father a son. Grahame Baker-Smith’s moving picture book story, illustrated with stunning collage artwork, shows how – with love, hope and ambition – you can reach seemingly impossible goals. This book is quite complicated for a picture book and so would be best for KS2 as it's quite difficult to follow and the story and meaning is open to interpretation. The father is far from perfect and gets swept up in his dreams, and even forgets about his son at times.Much later, the boy, now a young man finds himself drawn once more to his father’s drawings and failed experiments. His first title for Templar Books, Leon and the Place Between, was short-listed for the Kate Greenaway Medal, and FArTHER went on to win in 2011.