Author says living in Berlin for almost two decades has allowed him to continue taking creative risks
Julian Gough: 'The reason there was a creative boom in Paris between the wars ... you could survive and thrive on feck all.' Photograph: Juliana Socher
Gough is speaking to me from Berlin, the city that has been his home for almost two decades, after he found himself an economic refugee from his native Galway. “The Celtic Tiger priced me out of Ireland,” he recalls. “I couldn’t pay the rent, so I was evicted, and I emigrated on Ryanair to the nearest arts-friendly city that had affordable rent, and Berlin was bursting with empty properties.”
In the years since, he admits, the situation has deteriorated. “A whole way of life obliterated,” he says; the disappearance of a culture where you could “survive as an artist on £17 a week. You could lower your overheads to an absurd extent and live on almost nothing. That bought you time to find your voice and get up on your feet. You didn’t have to earn money from art at the start, but that’s just not possible now and that’s a catastrophe for the arts.
For Gough, the intergenerational relationship he was building through this bedtime story time was its own reward. The very recent death of his much-loved father, Richard , reminded him of how much he “helped me build the worldview that led to Rabbit & Bear. A lot of Bear’s wisdom comes from him,” Gough says. “He was a wonderful man.
“I think when people can’t find the right book for their kids or kids can’t find the right book for them, they blame themselves. But it was really this invisible problem: print costs, and the limitations of technology.” Rabbit & Bear was one of the books that helped to break that mould, and the genre of the illustrated chapter book has grown and grown in the years since.
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