ABSTRACT
Children’s and young adult literature could, in many ways, be said to be in its prime; the number of works published is increasing year on year and sales were boosted by the pandemic lockdown, perhaps due to a need on the part of adult carers to compensate for screen use by encouraging children to read print books. According to the 13th edition of Fundación SM’s Anuario Iberoamericano sobre el Libro Infantil y Juvenil 2021 [Ibero-American Yearbook of Books for Children and Young Readers] 2021, reader numbers had increased by 69% in comparison with 2019. Within this, one of the fastest growing areas has been non-fiction books. Clémentine Beauvais highlights the fact that these include a profusion of biographies particularly targeted at children (2020, pp. 57–79). Biographical writing is in very good health today, despite being one of the oldest genres of children’s literature, with its roots in the lives of saints and other exemplary figures. Beauvais, nevertheless, argues that children’s literature scholars despise the genre, a disdain she attributes to the didactic angle that was historically so typical of biographies aimed at children.
