Dyonne Josiah won a book prize with How Do You Get A Baby?

“HOW do you get a baby, mummy?”

It’s a question that can strike fear into the heart of the most relaxed of parents – but never fear, an Islington author has just won a prize for her book How Do You Get A Baby?

Dyonne Josiah, of Birchmore Walk in Highbury, said: “I know when I wrote this title of this book, I thought I’m definitely going to get a lot of raised eyebrows. But I’ve written it at the time where I know a lot of children ask that question or start to ask that question. And there are some parents who are like, ‘I have no idea what to say’.”

Her book, which won the Golden Wizard Book Prize last month, explores the journey its character Canary Ryland goes on as she asks the question, “how do you get a baby?” repeatedly throughout its pages.

“My character goes to her friends who are of the same age as her and the response that they give her is ‘My mum swallowed a football’; ‘My mum ate a big massive pink and blue cake’. They’re all six so it’s just from the minds of them and what’s in their lives and how they view pregnant women.

“And then she’s thinking, ‘OK, well, a football won’t fit in your mouth’. And ‘If you eat too many cakes, you might get sick,’ so that kind of stuff. She then asks her parents, who then say to her, ‘Where do you think babies come from?’ So I’ve left it open.”

She suggests that for adults reading the story with curious kids, a good idea is to ask the child to write down their ideas and then explore it together: depending on how close or far away they are from the truth, parents and carers can decide to either tell them “the full whack or just, you know, keep going with what they’ve written”.

Ms Josiah has written 29 books for children, including two others about babies.

www.canaryryland.com