Meet the author

Jayde Perkin.

Writer & illustrator · United Kingdom

Jayde Perkin: a Bristol-based author-illustrator whose debut Mum's Jumper handles the death of a parent with rare honesty and grace, a calm, beautifully painted, deeply comforting picture book about grief.

Jayde Perkin is a British author-illustrator based in Bristol, who came to picture books through autobiographical comics made after her own mother died. In our corpus she is represented by her debut, Mum's Jumper, published by Book Island. Reproduced from her hand-painted artwork, it follows a young girl through the strange, heavy weeks after her mum dies, the numbness, the flashes of anger, the too-quiet house, until she finds her mother's jumper, still holding her smell, and begins to wear it like a hug from someone who is gone. As the seasons pass she comes to understand that grief is a bit like the jumper: it stays the same size, but slowly she grows into it. Tender, honest and never frightening, it is a calm, deeply reassuring companion for any child, or grown-up, finding a way through loss, grounded in grief, love and the slow work of change.