The Yoto Carnegie Awards ceremony took place at the Barbican Arts Center (London, England) and was broadcast live across the UK. This is the UK's annual award given to outstanding works for children and young people written in English, to create a better world through reading.

Zeet Dzung artist. Photo: Nguyen Kim Long

With the hand-painted watercolor illustrations in “Saving Sorya: Chang and the Sun Bear” published by Pan Macmillan Publishing House, artist Jeet Zdung excelled in beating the other 17 candidates to become the winner.

The book follows the journey of Chang, a young girl with big dreams of saving endangered wildlife, and tells the story of animals on the brink of extinction.

Chang's adventure begins when she meets Sorya, a sun bears rescued from poachers by the Bear Rescue Center. After their meeting, she is determined to return Sorya to the wild.

“Saving Sorya: Chang and the Sun Bear” published by Pan Macmillan Publishing House. Photo: Nguyen Kim Long

Through their stories, Chang and her new friend Sorya take readers on a journey to discover the beauty of nature and the lives of wild animals.

Janet Noble, President of the jury, commented that this is an emotional story about nature conservation, drawing strong inspiration from the true story of a young girl who persevered in her pursuit of wildlife conservation from a very young age.

Artist Jeet Zdung, whose real name is Nguyen Tien Dung, was born in 1988. He has won awards for his illustrations, and his work was featured at the Cartoon Festival organized by the Wallonia-Bruxelles Delegation in Vietnam in 2012.

According to independent.co.uk, Zdung dreamed of drawing cartoons as a child. The process of creating the book "was a journey to satisfy the child's longing," he said, and he had to create an immersive film on paper with influences from comics and manga.

The images inside the book. Photo: Nguyen Kim Long

To create very vivid landscape paintings, artist Jeet Zdung had to directly conduct field research. He said that going to the field and participating in volunteer activities at the bear rescue center helped him have more experiences to enrich the lives of the characters, making them closer and more real.

“It is a great honor for me to receive the Carnegie Award. Hopefully, that will make a wide impact, draw public attention to the life of sun bears in particular, and wildlife in general, contribute to raising public awareness about wildlife conservation," he said.

In 2021, the book beat hundreds of works and won Prize A - National Book Award, one of the top book awards in Vietnam. Its copyright has been sold to many countries and territories around the world, such as the UK, USA, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Norway, Turkey, Russia, Sweden, and Japan.

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