Literature

Literature, here, refers to the titles where Jenkins works with an existing text rather than starting from research alone. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, chosen to represent this category, is his prose retelling of Swift’s 1726 satire, condensing all four of Gulliver’s voyages, Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the Houyhnhnms, for readers roughly ages 8 to 12 while keeping the original’s satirical edge on political factionalism and human folly intact.

The book paired Jenkins’s text with Chris Riddell’s illustrations, a combination that won the 2004 CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal, the UK’s top prize for illustration in a children’s book. It’s a different kind of project than his natural history titles, adaptation rather than original nonfiction, but it draws on the same instinct for finding the version of a big, complicated story that a young reader can actually follow.

Jenkins’s other literary project of note is his own original writing style within nonfiction, treating a true story, a penguin’s vigil, a tiger’s decline, with the same narrative shaping a novelist would use: a clear arc, real stakes, and a voice pitched exactly at its young audience. Gulliver represents the other side of that skill, adapting someone else’s fiction rather than his own research, but the instinct for pacing and voice carries over directly.

Reviewers have generally treated Jenkins’s adaptation work and his original nonfiction as two sides of the same skill rather than separate projects: both depend on deciding what to cut from a true or existing story without losing what makes it worth telling in the first place. That’s arguably harder with someone else’s satire than with his own research, since the cuts have to preserve a tone he didn’t originally set. It’s worth noting that “literature” here means narrative craft and adaptation rather than fiction generally, since nearly everything else in Jenkins’s catalogue is nonfiction; Gulliver is very much the exception in his body of work rather than representative of it.