The Great Beetletown Cooking Contest
It’s time for Beetletown’s annual cooking competition. All the bees, butterflies, beetles and bugs are excitedly preparing to impress the jury with their best recipes. All except for the dung beetles. Because they never win anyway. The jury won’t even taste the dung beetles’ entry. But the oldest and wisest dung beetle refuses to give in.
Geertje Aalders’s beautifully intricate collages, with every antenna, wing, marshmallow and petal cut with painstaking skill from paper, combine with Bibi Dumon Tak’s hilarious characters and perfectly pitched text to create a brilliantly quirky tale that’s also an absolute beauty. Both the text and the illustrations are packed with juicy little details. Who knew poo could taste so good?’
Bibi Dumon Tak (b. 1964) is the first non-fiction writer for children to have won the Theo Thijssen Prize for her oeuvre.