Torben Kuhlmann – World Kid Lit
By Johanna McCalmont
This week we meet German author and illustrator Torben Kuhlmann for a peek behind the scenes of the lively little mouse community that feature in his latest book, Earhart – The Incredible Flight of a Field Mouse Around the World (NorthSouth Books, May 2025).
World Kid Lit: This isn’t the first book in the series, it’s the fifth in fact. Where did the idea for this little field mouse come from? What kind of adventures has the mouse been on?
Torben Kuhlmann: Like the rest of my adventure stories, it all began with a tiny idea. That idea was based on a play on words in the German original. It’s not actually a field mouse. In German, it’s called a ‘digging mouse’. My idea was that in that community, which is solely focused on digging, one mouse chooses a different path. Instead of digging downwards, she wants to reach high, learn to fly and circle the world. A goal that, of course, the others don’t understand or appreciate. Suddenly, I had two important elements of the story at my fingertips: resistance to social conventions and the desire to fly round the world in an aeroplane. It was only natural that I quickly landed on the name Earhart as a possible namesake for this fifth mouse adventure.
WKL: This beautifully illustrated book is slightly unusual in that it starts with a fairly typical children’s story featuring an adventurous little creature before transitioning into the biography of a well-known historical figure, Amelia Earhart. It’s almost like two books in one! Did your inspiration for the books in this series come from the historical figures? Or did each mouse’s adventure take the lead?
TK: Indeed, the idea of a mouse’s adventure comes first. The real life person who ends up providing the name for the mouse adventure is not something I decide at the outset. The initial idea then evolves into a rather rough plot line, and the first potential connections to real life characters start to pop up. As I said, for Earhart the idea of a mouse circling the world and fighting societal restraints came first. Early on in the process, this pointed me towards the endeavours of the similar-minded Amelia Earhart. Then, it was a fun exercise to incorporate details of Earhart’s biography into the story. Like my mouse, she was inspired to become a pilot after seeing an air show. That’s something I hint at in my story. Finally, there is the reveal where these two like-minded characters might have interacted at some point in history.
WKL: You’re both an illustrator and an author. What does your process look like? Does the text come first? Or the illustrations? Were there any specific challenges with this story?
TK: There was a vague concept of a story first, but it was neither text nor image. After that, the tiny initial idea evolved into a rough plot outline, and I had some early ideas for illustrations as well as text fragments. I collected a lot of these ideas in my sketch book until I was ready to organize everything into an annotated storyboard. Again, text and illustrations developed simultaneously. This was the moment I could confidently present the story to my publisher and – after I got a green light – I started working on the first illustrations, followed by a first draft of the story. The draft was continuously refined over the following months as more and more illustrations were added to the book until everything came together like a giant puzzle. One major challenge was keeping everything from feeling stale or from repeating myself. It is after all my second foray into the world of flying mice and my fifth mouse adventure.
WKL: The illustrated spreads fill in ‘gaps’ between the short chapters of text. I found myself slowing down to pause and take in all the details in the illustrations. Were you thinking of any particular readers when you created Earhart?
TK: I try not to think about any particular group of readers while crafting my books. Most of the time I apply the same philosophy that served me well while I was working on Lindbergh back in 2012. My goal then was to satisfy my current self with a book that would’ve also excited my former, five-year-old self. Luckily, that seemed to be something that resonated with a lot of people. One aspect of that approach is to use the narrative potential of an image as much as possible – sometimes without adding words to describe what’s happening. Other times I can use words to create a certain atmosphere and build up tension, only to resolve everything in a wordless, full-page illustration. Of course, readers are invited to dive into the details and the many narrative titbits. As we’ve seen over the last decade, young readers are exceptionally good at switching from a text-based to an image-based narrative. You might argue that this kind of picture book is more a visual medium rather than a literary one.
WKL: The story is set in an entirely different era that is captured, for example, through the sepia palette and details like the slow exchange of letters. How important do you think it is for children to read historical fiction and biographies?
TK: The story is set in the early 1920s and I tried to portray that era as authentically as possible. But – as experience has shown – kids have no problem adapting to a story set in a different time, as long as some of the more obscure details are explained. I am not able to make a judgement on how important it is for children to read historical fiction. Again, I can only speak from my own experience. As a child I was always driven by my curiosity about history. I wanted to learn why things are the way they are today. Obviously, that meant looking back at a time of pioneering and unprecedented engineering. The mouse adventures do the same thing, looking back at the origins of aviation for example.
WKL: This book, however, isn’t just an adventure story or a biography, it also explores several universal themes, like being misunderstood by your community or having different dreams from everyone else and the need to be brave. What do you think makes readers, of any age, connect with a character?
TK: The struggle for acceptance might be universally understood. Our field mouse in Earhart is baffled by the reaction of her peers and the way in which they reject any desire to fly. As a reader you understand that pain – you may even relate to it – and, as a result, you root for that little mouse to succeed. Readers can connect with the character’s journey and hopefully they’ll feel as relieved and overjoyed as the little mouse when the plane finally lifts off and all the hard work pays off.
WKL: If you could meet a famous person from the past, who would it be?
TK: For a long time, my first answer would have been Albert Einstein. There is a reason why I dedicated my last mouse adventure to his revolutionary work in physics. But after doing a lot of research, I would be just as eager to meet Amelia Earhart. Everything I read painted the picture of a kind, spirited and forward-thinking pioneer – not only in aviation.
WKL: And finally, are you working on any other new projects that you can tell us about?
TK: Currently, I am still on a self-declared mouse-pause. Although, to be fair, there are still a lot of mice in the illustrations I am currently doing. But these are unrelated to any book project. Next on my schedule, I will start brainstorming and doodling for a possible next book. What will ultimately come out of that process, I am unable to say right now. But I am sure this mysterious project will take shape during this summer.
Torben Kuhlmann lives and works in Hamburg as a freelance children’s author and illustrator. He studied illustration and communications design at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. He wrote and illustrated his first picture book, Lindbergh: The Tale of a Flying Mouse, in 2012 as his final thesis, and it was published in 2014 by NorthSouth. It quickly became a bestseller and has been translated into more than 30 languages. Three more Mouse Adventures followed and were equally successful, including 2019 Batchelder honor and ALA Notable Book Edison. The publication of Earhart, the fifth book, marks the tenth anniversary of the series. However, a few mouse-free books have also crept into the repertoire during the last ten years, including Moletown, The Clown Said No, and The Gray City. Read more about Torben here.
Johanna McCalmont is a Northern Irish freelance translator conference interpreter based in Brussels, Belgium. She works from French, German, Dutch, and Italian into English. She translates fiction and non-fiction for adults and all sorts of stories for younger readers, from picture books to YA. She also loves to connect writers with audiences when interpreting at literary festivals and has a particular interest in African literature. Her latest picture translations are The Best Daddy of All (NorthSouth Books, April 2025) and Kaleidoscope Club Book 3 (Blue Dot Kids Press, April 2025). Read more about Johanna here.
