Sanne Rooseboom and Mark Janssen

Mark Janssen (1974) is a Dutch book illustrator and children’s author. He has illustrated hundreds of children’s and picture books, with the first children’s book he helped to visualise being the work of Ulf Stark, another previous guest of HeadRead. Two reasons bring Janssen to the HeadRead Literary Festival. The first is that he has also illustrated all the books of the Sanne Rooseboom’s Ministry of Solutions. The second reason, however, is thanks to none other than Janssen himself: in 2016, he began writing his own books (and, of course, illustrating what he wrote). Success was not far behind: Janssen’s first book, Niets gebeurd (Nothing Happened), received a lot of praise. In the 2020s, Janssen has continued his creative journey with increasing success, including with his 2021 book Dreamer, a heartfelt story of equality and difference, which became one of the best-selling books in the Netherlands in the year of its publication.

Sanne Rooseboom (1979) is a Dutch children’s author. Children know her as a writer who invented the Ministry of Solutions. Rooseboom has already written six books about the activities of this institution, three of which can also be read in Estonian. This allows Rooseboom to offer children both adventurous and socially sensitive stories. The series is kicked off by ‘Ministry of Solutions’ (Het Ministerie van Oplossingen), originally published in 2016, where one of the main characters, an 11-year-old vigorous girl named Nina, decides to search for this institution to help her friend Ruuben, who is being bullied at school. In the book ‘The Ministry of Solutions and the Missing Van Gogh’ (Het Ministerie van Oplossingen en de verdwenen Van Gogh), Niina, Ruuben and their other friends are already working for the Ministry of Solutions, which is why they are helping a family in Rotterdam to search for a lost drawing by the famous artist. In the third book in the series, The Ministry of Solutions and the House Full of Treasures (Het Ministerie van Oplossingen en het te volle huis), the plot is set off by notes of inventions found in a house that needs to be emptied, which, of course, need the officials of the Ministry of Solutions to protect them.