The little world inside

Picture Book Project by Haya Halaw

This page presents the picture book project written & illustrated by Haya Halaw currently in development.

All texts and illustrations are unpublished and shared for review and potential collaboration purposes.

This story is presented as an author-led picture book. It is a story about a child and her father learning how to hold each other. It explores how imagination can become a way of holding on, and how a child’s voice can gently bring someone back to life.
The book offers a double reading, for children and for adults. While it remains accessible to young readers, it also touches on feelings that speak to adults ; the strength and beauty of childhood, and the slow work of rebuilding after something has been lost.
The story belongs to a rare lineage of picture books that deal with absence and renewal through an elegant, gentle metaphor, leaving space for the reader to feel and understand in their own way.

- Illustrated Arab Team

The selected storyboard pages

Synopsis

Every Sunday, the girl comes home and tells her father about her day. She talks about a bear she met, tea she shared, fruit she picked with fairies. Her stories sound magical, but they are made from small things she notices around her, from the world they share.

They live near a forest. In winter, everything is quiet. The days feel long and empty. The father is there, sitting close, saying little. The girl feels his presence, even when no words are exchanged.

So she talks.

She invents. She brings colour into the quiet. She does not try to fix anything. She simply tells him what she sees, and stays.

Technical details

Genre: Author-led picture book by Haya Halaw

Structure: Episodic, relational arc

Theme handling: Indirect, metaphor-based

Target: Children 6–9 + adult readers

Key strength: Emotional precision through minimalism

Length: 16 spreads.

Original Language: English

Haya Halaw

Syrian Author-illustrator, based in Germany

Haya Halaw is an award wining Syrian illustrator/ painter based in Hamburg Germany. Illustrated more than 18 children’s books . Her work also includes comics, Editorials, and paintings. She had her first solo exhibition in 2022 titled” of Home in Land” in Amman, Jordan.