Drawing recipes is Alya Markova’s way of showing her joy in the cooking process. Her style is expressive and cheerful, with a quick playful touch. In A Cookbook for Big Children, the colours are fresh and the open compositions spin in mad motion. The texts are written/drawn in different sizes and colours, the exclamations are an integral part of the imagery of the book, and the hands are in motion – they mash, knead, stir. Dialogues with imaginary witnesses –a mother, grandmother, or the readers themselves – are peppered with humour. The comic book symbols of speech bubbles and motion lines add emotion, and the exclamations draw so much sound out of the illustrations that we hear the clattering, bubbling, and all manner of kitchen noises from every page. This fun, masterfully illustrated book shares the joy of cooking, but you also feel, in an unexpected way, a longing for human interaction.
Alya Markova
A Cookbook for Big Children
Illustrator: Alya Markova
List
224 pages
190 х 270, hardback
6+
ISBN 978-619-772-200-0
A Cookbook for Big Children
Alya Markova
Alya Markova divides her time between Bulgaria and Spain. A significant amount of her work as an illustrator is related to cooking. Since 2009, she has maintained a blog with drawn recipes, which she turned into original books published in Spanish and Bulgarian between 2013 and 2023. Over the years, Markova has worked with some of the largest Spanish publishing houses, such as SM, Anaya, Edelvives, Santillana, and Oxford University Press, for which she has illustrated numerous textbooks and educational materials. Her three books dedicated to cooking have been highly praised by critics and have been awarded the prestigious Bulgarian Hristo G. Danov award, 2013, as well as the Gourmand Cookbook Awards in 2013 and 2023. Her new project is an autobiographical graphic novel.