Yang Dong/ Childhood

Yang Dong is a UK-based author-illustrator whose work explores the intersection of storytelling, play, and participation. Winner of the Bologna Illustration Award in 2022, her picture books have been published internationally. Alongside her creative practice, she is a full-time university lecturer and holds a PhD in Illustration, specializing in participatory design in children's picturebooks.

Dong's practice investigates how picturebooks can become immersive spaces for imagination and interaction. She is particularly interested in the ways children engage physically with books—through touch, movement, page-turning, and imaginative play—and how these actions become an integral part of the storytelling experience. Rather than viewing the book as a passive surface for images, she approaches it as an active narrative object that invites exploration, manipulation, and discovery.

Inspired by everyday childhood experiences such as cooking, dressing up, and first haircuts, Dong transforms familiar moments into playful, interactive narratives through the use of die-cuts, flaps, tactile materials, and inventive book structures. Her creative practice is informed by research into children's play, participatory reading, and material storytelling, with a particular focus on how simple gestures and symbolic objects can encourage curiosity, empathy, imagination, and creative engagement with the world.