For the International Day of Peace: A Homecoming Cover Reveal and Q&A with Margaryta Winkler

Just last month I was talking about The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss and mentioned how discussing the arms race in picture books for kids doesn’t really speak to children in 2026. But that’s American children, isn’t it? We’ve a very specific p.o.v. in this country and war doesn’t really come into it. One might very well argue that this is precisely why we need children’s books in the States that offer outside perspectives. I mean, in this year alone we’ve seen a marvelous array of books for kids that really make it quite clear that while we may be lucky enough to not be touched by war here in the States, around the world it is a VERY prevalent and serious issue. Books like The Yellow Hats by Kelly Matathia-Covo or War by Eoin Colfer.

But how do you frame a conflict on the picture book page? It requires a bit of finesse, right? A bit of finagling. And what picture book author/illustrator Margaryta Winkler figured out was that one way is to make it very clear how war and battle and violence affects the natural world. Homecoming, a picture book releasing on February 16, 2027, sports this subtitle: “A Story of War, Nature, and Hope.” And here’s how the publisher describes it:

A Ukrainian white stork journeys home in this wordless testament to war’s environmental cost and nature’s boundless hope.

Over a blue-and-yellow shoreline flies a white stork: Ukraine’s symbol of spring, peace, and well-being. The sky is full of fire and smoke, but the stork soars onward. It flies over minefields, flooded neighborhoods, and thousands of bombed-out buildings. Yet all this violence cannot stop the stork from finding its way home.

Shaped by news stories, the author’s heritage, and her authentic experiences of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Homecoming is a wordless picture book tribute to hope amidst the environmental impact of global violence. Winkler’s arresting watercolor landscapes provide an engaging backdrop for discussions of both historic and current conflicts and their ecological impacts . Back matter includes an author’s note and information about the ramifications of war for ecosystems around the world. 

Art from Homecoming was chosen as a winner for American Illustration 44, and it was exhibited at the Pictus Unpublished Picturebook Showcase. It also received a Merit Award at the 3×3 International Illustration Show. Originally published in Italy, Homecoming is Margaryta Winkler’s English-language debut.

A portion of the proceeds from Homecoming will be given to support the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group (uncg.org.ua/en), a member organization of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) working for the benefit of Ukraine’s wildlife during the war.

A good description, but there’s a lot more to discuss with this title. And to do that, I had to speak to creator Margaryta Winkler herself. So today, on the International Day of Peace, we’re talking Homecoming.

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Betsy Bird: Margaryta, thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions today. In HOMECOMING you’ve used wildlife as the lens through which to view a human war with environmental repercussions. Please tell us a bit about the origins of this story and the necessity you felt to tell it.

Margaryta Winkler: Thanks so much for having me on the blog! The story of this book begins in February 2024, in the second semester of my MFA program at Rhode Island School of Design. I had moved to the US from Ukraine only a few months earlier as a recipient of the Fulbright grant. As I no longer had to wake up to air raid sirens or spend nights in my basement, I felt a moral obligation to those who still did and those who were going through far worse. I wanted to use my time at RISD to make art about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war was just starting to become “old news” in Western media at the time, and I thought that if my project could keep even just my peers and professors engaged a little while longer, that alone would make it worthwhile. This was my starting point: I had a vague idea of making a book about war as my second semester project and I wanted to work with watercolor.

BB: Was it always the plan to keep the book wordless from the start? And did you find yourself challenged or invigorated by its silence?

Margaryta: Absolutely, I knew the book would be wordless before I knew anything else. Having come to the US, I quickly realized I couldn’t verbalize my experiences of this war, and not because I was still in shock. The reality of war and the reality of peace felt so far apart that I could never find the right words to bridge them. Even if I’d wanted to add words to the book, I wouldn’t have known where to start.

While the book’s wordlessness primarily came from my own inability to speak, I think it ended up working on a few additional levels. The white stork, the book’s protagonist, is essentially mute. It communicates only by clattering its beak. The bird can’t tell you the stories of loss it witnesses, but it can bring you along and show you what it sees. Nature is often called the silent victim of war. Burned crops and lost animal lives can’t speak for themselves, and the book’s silence honors that.

I’m a big fan of the wordless picture book genre in general. Pool by JiHyeon Lee and The Arrival by Shaun Tan are some of my favorite picture books, not least because they’re wordless. I even wrote my master’s thesis on wordless storytelling in books and film. It lends itself wonderfully to stories that are meant to be experienced rather than understood—which is how I see HOMECOMING.

BB: Picture books offer a medium through which to tackle difficult subject matter, but they also have limitations and strict parameters in place. Horror can never be too horrific. How did you find the right balance between depicting the reality on the ground and retaining a book that is both child appropriate and hopeful?

Margaryta: As an artist, I’m drawn to beauty. Even when I’m depicting something horrible—certain aspects of war in this case—I don’t want it to look repulsive or unpleasant. I never intended to shock or distress the prospective reader—I only hoped they would empathize with the stork. Keeping the imagery aesthetically pleasing was almost a way to lure in readers who might otherwise avoid the subject if they knew what they were looking at. I wasn’t thinking of HOMECOMING as a children’s book when I first conceived it, but the strategy of keeping the illustrations a little ambiguous and not immediately suggestive of war is what made it child-appropriate.

BB: Talk to us a little about the chosen medium for the book. Why did you feel that watercolors were the best possible method to tell this tale?

Margaryta: Watercolor is one of my favorite mediums, even though I’d worked almost exclusively digitally for many years before joining RISD. Digital illustration makes a lot of practical sense for client work, but with this book, all the creative decisions were going to come from me, so I was excited to return to working on paper. The subject matter was going to be emotionally challenging, and I needed some parts of the process to bring me joy if I was going to see the book through. Painting with watercolor was exactly that. I love the immediacy and spontaneity of watercolor, especially when working alla prima, which I did a lot throughout the book. It’s exhilarating to work this way: I never knew exactly what the final image would look like, and I was always ready to start from scratch (and often did).

BB: Was there anything that you encountered in the course of creating this book that surprised you? Or anything that you wish you could have included but simply did not fit?

Margaryta: Not really—and that’s what’s surprising. Looking back, it almost feels like the book made itself. It started with a vague idea of a silent book about war featuring watercolor landscapes, and then everything gradually fell into place: the specific aspects of Russia’s invasion I wanted to show, the order of events, the protagonist. Many of the final illustrations are compositionally identical to the initial rough sketches. A process this smooth never happens to me!

BB: Some American parents shy away instinctively from picture books that discuss heavier topics like war because they feel inadequate to talk about such things with their children. To such parents and guardians, what advice would you give on having hard conversations with your children after reading HOMECOMING?

Margaryta: I’m wary of giving parenting advice, as I don’t have children of my own. I do, however, remember many of my own thoughts and ways of perceiving the world from when I was very little, and I’m convinced that adults often underestimate how much children understand even at a very young age. I’d encourage parents and guardians reading HOMECOMING with their kids to allow them to lead the conversation. Just let them experience the book as it is, without any preliminary explanations, and see what draws their attention, what raises questions, what they think they’re looking at, what they think happened to the white stork and why. I don’t think the book needs to carry a grand moral message for the child readers. I just hope it touches them and leaves a mark.

BB: Finally, what else are you working on these days? What’s next for you?

Margaryta: I’m back to doing mostly client work, currently working on a few book covers and an illustrated short story collection. I don’t have any large personal projects in the works at this moment, but I’d definitely love to revisit wordless storytelling in the future, perhaps as a longer story in the form of a graphic novel.

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And now, as promised, the cover itself in all its glory:

Special thanks to Margaryta for answering so many of my questions. Thank you too to Amy Storey and the team at Eerdmans Books for Young Readers for this reveal. Homecoming is on shelves everywhere February 16, 2027, so be sure to look for it then! It’s a beauty.

Filed under: Cover Reveal, Interviews