In his exquisitely illustrated epistolary novel, Self Portrait (Levine Querido, 2025), Ludwig Volbeda, a fine artist and award-winning illustrator of many children’s books, introduces readers to Jip, a teen who’s grappling with social isolation and gender identity—the latter accentuated by a school assignment to draw a self-portrait. Jip’s letters to a crush, written over the course of spring break, draw readers into a fully realized world populated by vivid characters. The book, translated from Dutch by Lucy Scott, was recently selected by the United States on Board on Books for Young People (USBBY) as one of the outstanding international books of 2025. Volbeda, who is based in the Netherlands, answered our questions by email in English; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired you to start writing for young people?

I stumbled into it through illustration and quickly discovered that it offered far more freedom than I’d expected. The connection between text and image fascinated me. Draw a cave, write underneath it “Nils never came back,” and suddenly there’s a story.

Although youth literature feels like home, I don’t think I write for teenagers as a group.

For me, the age on a book cover is more a gentle suggestion. If you write from the lived experience of a character, the story hopefully may resonate with a particular group of readers.

Did anything specific inspire Jip’s story?

I’d saved some money so I could work quietly in my studio, without knowing what the result would be: a picture book, comic, or something else. I made drawings and wrote short texts about things that interested me, such as vacant lots and playgrounds. At some point I drew someone lying in the grass, reading a book. The grass was so tall that you could only see two little arms sticking out, and an open book. I wondered, Who is that?

Whoever it was, they were stubborn, appearing again in short scenes, taking detours from school to home, drawing insects, visiting a grandmother who slipped a $10 bill into their coat pocket like a reverse pickpocket.

And then I remembered sitting on a boat at a children’s birthday party, looking at a boy and not knowing if I wanted to get to know him or if I wanted to be him. When I wrote that down, the earlier loose scenes and sketches moved toward that scene, like ants swarming a breadcrumb covered with jam. The person lying in the field became the “I,” Jip.

A story emerged, not because I wanted to write a youth novel but because I wanted to work on this story. That was also true for the theme. I hadn’t planned to write about gender—it felt too private—but once I did, I wanted to do it from the inside out, showing how someone can feel hesitant and certain at the same time.

The epistolary format is so effective but seems more challenging than writing a traditional novel.

For me, letters felt more approachable! I wasn’t sure whether I could write a novel, but writing [letters] felt like assembling a stained-glass window piece by piece. At Jip’s age, I wrote many unsent letters that I hid in an atlas. I explained myself to someone, assuming I would be unlovable without instructions. The letters in Self Portrait allowed me to shift tone—boredom, curiosity, openness, or avoidance, while slowly building structure and story.

What responses have you had from readers?

Shortly after the book was published, I received a message from a 10-year-old, passed on by a parent. That letter has stayed with me. Such a young reader understood the story so precisely from the inside. I found that deeply moving. Children are so often underestimated.

What I notice now is that international readers write more about the neurodivergent traits they recognize in Jip. I find that interesting. Sometimes people ask whether their interpretation of something is correct. In a way, it always is. Meaning doesn’t exist only in the text but also in our reception of it. People also send me photographs of insects, sometimes without any accompanying message. Just an image of a beetle they saw somewhere.

What’s the climate like for publishing for young readers in the Netherlands?

[These days] there’s less attention to youth literature. Newspapers and magazines publish fewer reviews and often no longer have children’s pages, where short stories and poems for children or letters written by children themselves appear. Many discussions focus on declining reading habits. What is going well is the youth literature itself! The quality of youth literature here is extraordinarily high.

In the U.S., we have some superb Dutch authors for young people available in translation—Edward van de Vendel, Bibi Dumon Tak, and Yorick Goldewijk, for example. But that’s only a tiny glimpse of the whole picture.

You’ve named some of my favorites! What I love about youth literature is how naturally it moves beyond the human perspective. What does the world look like if you’re an ant? Anthropomorphism is often dismissed, but I see it as a way of forming stronger bonds with the world. Bibi Dumon Tak does this beautifully.

Two of my favorites are Wim Hofman and Joke van Leeuwen, who combine language and images in such an interesting way.  And there are also extraordinary illustrators, such as Annemarie van Haeringen and Philip Hopman, who seem to draw as naturally as some people dance.

When you were young, did you enjoy art and reading?

Yes, I had a strong imagination, but imagination has a darker side, too. During the day, I could happily invent stories and draw for hours. At night, I lay awake, [thinking of] all the possible ways an upcoming school day could go wrong. Reading helped guide my imagination, and I would read until I fell asleep.

Because I spent so much time indoors, my parents suggested I take drawing lessons. When I struggled with drawing hands, I discovered Egon Schiele. His work was equally beautiful and disturbing—and therefore fascinating. It was also a way to look at the male body without raising questions.  

What attracts you to observing and drawing very small things?

My eye is drawn to the small. Even while drawing, I keep disappearing into a pebble, an elbow. I love small things and collections. In the books I’ve illustrated, I’ve hidden bits of code, and my handwriting is also quite small, almost encrypted.

I don’t know whether I notice small things because I’m interested in them, or whether I’m interested in them because I notice them. It’s probably circular. It’s no coincidence that the book starts with the word “Look!” It’s an invitation to look closer. Or, in the case of the cover, look sideways.

Are you working on another book?

Yes! It will likely be youth literature again. I’m working on a story about a fictional village. The houses are already there, and now I’m waiting for one of the houses to catch fire. I’m again in that wonderful phase where you can write all kinds of fragments and see where chain reactions start to occur.

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

It was nice to have the opportunity to think about children’s literature. I think it appeals to human qualities that we all have to some degree, but that are at their strongest in children: curiosity, wonder, imagination. That’s why I don’t see children’s literature strictly as literature for children but rather as literature in which a childlike way of seeing the world is central. That’s why I think it’s good for everyone to read children’s books.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.