“That’s absolutely hopeless!” declare the animals, as they watch the rhinoceros dancing with the hippopotamus. And it’s true – the wild way these two thick-skinned creatures come crashing together and fling each other about doesn’t have much to do with dancing. But these aren’t just any old animals: they’re characters in a book by Toon Tellegen, a writer who has created a genre all of his own with his philosophical and absurdist animal stories.

Polle is sitting beside his father’s dead body, giving him a lively and honest account of the events following his death: who’s been to visit, how strangely grown-ups talk about death and what’s going to happen at his funeral. He brings up memories of his father, both good ones and not such good ones. He’s even brave enough to say: ‘Sometimes, but hardly ever at all, I was sorry you were my dad.’

This may sound a little like the well-known Dutch pastime of breaking taboos, but this honesty is the true strength of this story by Tamara Bos, as both the dead father and his son are presented in a way that is very believable.

Annemarie van Haeringen has captured the life of Coco Chanel in striking images and a sleek and elegant story. This biographical picture book is a perfect blend of fact and fiction.

With a great eye for detail, children’s author Rindert Kromhout and illustrator Annemarie van Haeringen use words and pictures to tell a small but multi-faceted story about a devastating event in an Italian village. However, Die dag in augustus (That Day in August) is not just about how painfully unpredictable life can be. This is first and foremost a tale about how we need stories to survive and to live.

Following the international success of Coco, or the Little Black Dress, Annemarie van Haeringen has created another gem with this sparkling ode to the imagination.

The whale already has a fountain, but he’s missing a garden to go around it. So he writes to the grasshopper, who takes a huge pile of gardening equipment to the middle of the ocean and creates a pleasure garden on the whale’s back, full of hollyhocks, honeysuckle, and apple trees and “a shed with a little window with cobwebs and a door that sticks”.

On the day Sien leaves, the sky is pitch black. The cloud from which this wonderfully beautiful picture book develops is also pitch black.

Noah and his ark, God and his fury — the Bible story has been adapted thousands of times, but rarely as ingeniously as Gideon Samson has done in this book to accompany Annemarie van Haeringen’s pictures.

The stories from The One Thousand and One Nights have their roots in the Indian, Persian and Arab cultures. They came about in the ninth century and have travelled all over the world. Imme Dros has made a personal selection from this colourful collection of stories, rewriting thirty-one tales in an impressive, smoothly flowing metre that begs to be read aloud. Annemarie van Haeringen has created expressive pictures with a suitably eastern atmosphere to accompany the stories.

In the year when Bibi Dumon Tak’s non-fiction oeuvre won the Netherlands’ top prize for children’s literature, she also made her debut as a poet. That step is not as big as it might seem. The portraits of unusual animals in her non-fiction were practically poetry already, as a result of her unique way of observing the world.

It’s hard to understand each other, particularly when love is involved. How do you put what you feel into words?

Bibi Dumon Tak can do magic with words. Whether it’s facts, portraits or poetry, her language sparkles and shines. She uses that language mainly to write about the animal kingdom, tirelessly tweaking different genres to highlight animals’ unique characters.