“Our grandparents on both sides had dachshunds, we had dachshunds, our cousins had dachshunds.

“After Olivia, Tonia wanted her kids to be memorialized in a book, too, and dachshunds seemed natural because our family has always had dachshunds,” Falconer said. (Olivia is based on the real-life daughter of Falconer’s youngest sister.) The two dachshunds who star in his new picture book are named for his sister Tonia Barringer’s twins, Augie and Perry. Like his bestselling books about Olivia, Falconer’s family inspired Two Dogs. I fill in the text later on and Michael is very, very good at eliminating anything extraneous.” “She’s so good graphically, just extraordinary,” Falconer said. When Ann Bobco, who served as art director for the entire Olivia series, left Simon & Schuster and with Michael di Capua Books already at HarperCollins, Falconer had two powerful reasons to make a change. “I told him Olivia is the only book I’ve ever seen that was published by someone else that I wished I had published myself.” “I normally consider myself a very dignified individual but I rushed over to him like a teenage girl groupie and introduced myself,” di Capua recalled. “When the first Olivia came out, I was just blown away by it,” said di Capua, who met Falconer shortly after, at a party celebrating the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books in December 2000. The acquisition is a coup for di Capua, a longtime admirer of Falconer’s work.

The book will be published by Harper’s Michael di Capua Books in April 2020. He’s also moving house: Suzanne Murphy, president and publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books, has acquired world rights to Two Dogs, written and illustrated by Falconer, via Conrad Rippy at Levine Plotkin & Menin. Ian Falconer, creator of the internationally bestselling book series about Olivia the pig, is swapping porcine characters for canines in his first picture book outside of the Olivia universe.

Falconer ian