How Printmaking Turned an Internal Lived Experience into an Internationally Award-Winning Children’s Book

Some experiences are almost impossible to explain. You can describe them, define them, even diagnose them, but that does not mean someone else will understand what they actually feel like. For UK-based illustrator and printmaker Kate Rolfe, dyslexia was one of those experiences.

Wiggling Words, published by Two Hoots / Pan Macmillan, is an own-voices picture book rooted directly in Rolfe’s lived experience. Rather than setting out to educate or label, the project asks a different question. What does it feel like to read when letters refuse to behave?

As a child, reading was physically frustrating for Rolfe. Letters did not sit still on the page. They felt resistant, uncooperative, something to wrestle with rather than absorb. That embodied memory stayed with her, eventually becoming the conceptual core of the book.

“I wasn’t interested in making a book that describes dyslexia or teaches children about it. I wanted to make a book that feels like being inside that experience.”

For Rolfe, the solution was not found in digital tools but in printmaking.

Hand-printing became both method and metaphor. She began printing letters again and again, shifting them, overlapping them, reprinting and rearranging their relationships to one another and to the page. Many of the decisions were not planned in advance. They emerged through repetition and improvisation. In total, around 12,000 individual letters were hand printed to create the final artwork.

The physicality of that process mattered. It was slow, demanding, and repetitive. The effort embedded in the pages mirrors the persistence required when reading feels like a struggle. Letterpress gives each letter weight and presence. They do not float. They land with force. As the book progresses, those letters begin to take over the space, shaping the environment around the child character until language itself becomes something that can be built and restructured.

Alongside letterpress, Rolfe uses cyanotype, a light-based process rarely seen in contemporary children’s publishing. Cyanotype introduces openness and movement. It creates breathing space. Rolfe used it to form the child and the book they are reading, allowing a contrast to emerge between the solidity of printed type and the fluidity of image.

The interplay between these two processes was central to the narrative. Cyanotype carries lightness and possibility. Letterpress carries structure and weight. The shift from open space to one shaped by language reflects the journey from frustration to ownership.

Although deeply personal, Wiggling Words was never intended to feel private. Rolfe wanted children who recognise that struggle to feel seen, and children who do not to understand it emotionally without needing it explained in clinical terms.

The international recognition the book has received has been especially meaningful because the experience at its heart is so internal and difficult to articulate. That it resonates across cultures and languages speaks to the power of material process. When handled with care, print-led illustration can communicate what words alone cannot.

“Illustration, for me, is about taking something that mostly happens inside your head and finding a visual way for other people to recognise it. Printmaking gave me the tools to do that in a way that felt very authentic and honest.”

Kate Rolfe is a UK-based illustrator and printmaker working predominantly in children’s books. Her practice often draws on her own neurodivergent experience and explores emotional life from the inside out. Alongside Wiggling Words, she is also the creator of Wolf and Bear, which looks at mental health within friendship, and Owl and Moon, a neurodivergent-informed story about separation anxiety. Across her work, hand-printed processes such as letterpress and cyanotype remain integral, not as decoration, but as conceptual tools.

In Wiggling Words, printmaking is not simply a technique. It is structure, narrative, and voice. Through repetition, pressure, and ink, something invisible becomes tangible. Something internal becomes shared.

Find out more:
www.katerolfe.com
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Wiggling Words