Hannah Hopcroft sat down to write The Adventures of Olive upon returning to New Zealand after living in Latin America for almost 5 years.

At 17 Hannah went to Greece, this was the moment where life changed and she felt the noise, smell and colour of bustling foreign cities calling her in. At 20 she packed a bag and headed off with a one way ticket to Argentina where once again her senses would be excited and her life would again change forever.

Working in a bustling indoor market making coffee is where Hannah and Ernesto met and where they would decide that they should buy a van and drive to Mexico. This is when Olive, a little green kombi turned into their home and they set off with the goal of learning all they could about coffee.

Well, coffee they learnt about, but what Latin America had to teach them each and every day will forever be the greatest schooling they could have ever imagined. Lessons that to this day, 5 years on, are still becoming clear. Lessons of compassion, generosity, injustice and much more. Lessons that often came from the most unexpected places or people. To then touch back down in quiet New Zealand was not only hard, it was lonely.

But you can not share beauty without a moment to reflect. A moment of calm, no matter how difficult, to let all the lessons fall to the ground and make themselves seen. To chew on the words and the memories so that the understanding can come.

From this time of quite and calm came The Adventures of Olive, Hannahs way of recounting this time in small, beautiful, bilingual childrens books.