FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Markham, ON (December 9, 2011) – Red Deer Press is pleased to announce that Where Wild Horses Run by Georgia Graham has won the 2011 Langley Christian School Canadian Picture Book Award. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the award. The other nominees were Ella May and Wishing Stone by Cary Fagan, Picture a Tree by Barbara Reid, and Loon by Susan Vande Griek. All four books are read to over 430 students during their library class time during the month of November.

“We vote by ‘secret ballot’ and the winner is announced at our Red and White Canadian celebration assembly to a drum roll and loud cheering. We have a staff member who makes a beautiful poster replica of the book cover using pencil crayons and that is added to our growing ‘Sistine Chapel–like’ ceiling in our library,” explained Jenny deGroot, assistant principal and teacher librarian at Langley Christian Elementary School. .

Graham was delighted with the news. “I gave my first copy to my dad because, after all, he is the one who paid for me to go to art college in the early ’80s. Both he and my mother-in-law phoned me and really gushed over every detail of it. But the book is for children so it meant a lot to me that a school population would vote it in. It’s important to me that children enjoy it.” The illustrator of fourteen children’s books and the author and illustrator of four, Graham lives with her husband on a tree farm in Central Alberta and speaks to over 20,000 school children each year.

Graham went to the Nemaiah Valley, British Columbia in the middle of May to search for the wild horses when they were still low in the hills searching for the first blades of spring grass. There she found four bands, each led by a stallion, rippling in muscles, covered in battle wounds, and jealously protecting his mares. She camped on the shore of Chilko Lake, in snow at times, spying and observing the fascinating behaviour of the wild horse family. Where Wild Horses Run is about survival and the circle of life.

Georgia Graham hopes this story will ultimately inspire children with the hope that there are still truly wild places in this world worth our protection.

For more information, please contact:

Cheryl Chen | Publicist | Red Deer Press | cheryl.chen@fitzhenry.ca | 905-477-9700 ext. 258

For more information on the book, please visit: www.reddeerpress.com