Celebrating women explorers and adventurers with Mick & Brita Granström

Brita Granström & Mick Manning introduce Women Who Led The Way, a diverse and inclusive celebration of 21 amazing women explorers and adventurers.

Women Who Led The Way (Otter Barry Books)

International Women's Day, March 2022

Blog by Brita Granström & Mick Manning

I grew up in Sweden and now Mick and I take our children there every summer. That is where the idea for Women Who Led The Way began, one rainy day, with an old album of photographs taken by my great great aunt Hedvig. She had emigrated to America in 1885 on a steam ship, only returning to Sweden in 1913.

Hedvig owned her own camera and was an amateur photographer - something very unusual, especially for a woman, in the late 1800s. Among many amazing photos we found a small image, from about 1920, of two women straddling a huge motorbike. After some research we identified Hedvig's friend Ester Blenda Nordström. Esther, born in 1891, became a determined young journalist who, in 1913 had gone under cover as a farm maid to report on and expose the harsh working conditions of household servants in Sweden. This was just the first of various adventurous long-term journalist-assignments that would include living with the Sami in Lapland and hitchhiking alone across the USA.

In Sweden, Esther is a folk-hero and is taught in schools as an example of women's struggle for equal recognition with men. Her adventurous life set Mick and I thinking; we wanted to tell her story to children all over the world… Then, after a discussion with Janetta Otter Barry, publisher at Otter Barry Books, we discovered that, by coincidence, Janetta had received a request from primary teachers for a book about female explorers. We began to research further and, as we began to draw up a list it felt like we were assembling a team of elite women-superheroes made up of explorers and pathfinders.

To make the page-turn more exciting, we concentrated on examples of diversity and endeavour that spanned a thousand-year timeframe. We decided early on that not all of our explorers would be map-readers or travellers. You may wonder how someone can explore without physically travelling… well we found examples of amazing women who explored the microscopic universe sitting at their desk and, of course, the night sky, as epitomised by the 18th century career of Caroline Herschel, who, despite having only partial sight in one eye, travelled millions of light years while standing on a frosty lawn. She discovered comets and star clusters.

We have a bright-as-a-button Anglo-American niece called Mae who lives in New York and is so obsessed with space that she wants to be a space explorer herself when she grows up (she is only four years-old just now). So of course her namesake, the US astronaut Mae Jemison, is her hero and this made researching Mae's career all the more thrilling. We have also featured the amazing story of the Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.

We always enjoy the research stage, but this book was made largely during lockdown so we didn't get chance to make our usual research visits. However, we ordered lots of books and combed the internet to find our crew… in fact we found far more than the publisher would allow space for. This was a good thing as it made us edit, edit, edit until, in the end, we had assembled a team of hand-picked super explorers! We decided early on we wanted to our book to read as if each individual was telling their own story directly to the reader. This adds to the book's humanity and diversity and in, our experience, always makes a book more accessible to children.

Mick particularly enjoyed the story of Lee Miller, the brave photo-journalist who followed the Allied troops as they liberated Europe during WW2. Lee mocked the defeated Nazi's by posing for a photo in Hitler's personal bathtub with her muddy army boots on his bathmat! But of all the amazing people in our book, I think Arunima Sinha's story moved us most. This is the uplifting story of a volleyball champion who was selected for the Indian police force, only to be attacked by thieves as she travelled by train for her interview. Arunima defended herself but in the struggle, she was thrown off the train. She was injured so badly her leg had to be amputated. Yet she didn't give up! She went on to climb Mount Everest and become a great motivational speaker!

It's no coincidence our book is publishing on International Women's Day. It delivers an unflinching truth to both adults and children everywhere: 'Girls can do anything'! We have been inspired by all the women in our book and we feel sure others will be too. In my introduction to the book I quote Mae Jemison who once said. 'It's your life! Go on and do all you can with it'.

In this short video, Brita shows us how to draw one of her heroes, early US pilot Bessie Coleman, who also features in the book:

Brita Granström & Mick Manning have pioneered Picture Book Non-Fiction since 1995. They have won the Smarties Silver Award, five English Association Awards and have been shortlisted twice for the Astrid Lindgren Prize. In 2020 they were jointly awarded the SLA/Hachette award for Outstanding Contribution to Information Books. Find out more about Women Who Led the Way (Otter Barry Books), £12.99.