About dPICTUS
Picturebooks, illustrations, stories. dPICTUS helps them travel.
Our core service is the dPICTUS online platform, where international picturebook publishers and agents promote their titles, secure foreign rights deals, discover emerging talent, and make new publishing connections to meet at book fairs. Members of the platform include winners of prestigious awards such as the BolognaRagazzis.
Throughout the year, we invite guest curators – international picturebook and illustration specialists – to independently highlight their favourite picturebooks on the dPICTUS online platform, and to help us select titles for our 100 Outstanding Picturebooks exhibitions at international book fairs and other venues.
dPICTUS runs Picturebook Makers, a blog and online gallery where the world’s finest picturebook artists talk about the creation of their books. The resource has so far been visited over a million times by people from more than 200 countries.
Our most recent initiative is The Unpublished Picturebook Showcase. Emerging picturebook makers from around the world submit their unpublished projects to be considered by a large jury of international picturebook publishers. The publishers vote independently for their favourites, and the projects with the most votes go into a unique showcase at the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. Several artists from our first unpublished showcase have had their projects acquired by international publishers.
dPICTUS was founded in England by brothers Sam McCullen (illustrator, writer, editor and designer) and Jon McCullen (designer and web developer), and the platform was developed with generous feedback and guidance from a small group of international publishers and agents. In 2016, author-illustrator Kitty Crowther from Belgium joined the team, and Swedish publisher Erik Titusson has been the main advisor since 2017.
Illustration by Kitty Crowther
“Since our first of many visits to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, we’ve been captivated by the beautiful, innovative, powerful, diverse, touching and challenging picturebooks being published around the world. With dPICTUS and the Picturebook Makers resource, we’re dedicated to helping these outstanding picturebooks reach new markets and captivate new readers.”
