Shazia longs for a snow leopard but when she rescues Yardil, she learns that there is something more important than her own dream and everyone in her stair-step village discovers the special gift of the snow leopard. Yardil is a picture book for lower to mid-primary  children, set in the Rumbur Valley, Chitral in the Hindu Kush Mountains, Pakistan.

Younger readers love Elizabeth Stanley's illustrations of snow leopards.

Themes: Asian content (Northern Pakistan), environment/conservation of Kalasha culture, snow leopards

and forests.

Published 2004

Windy Hollow Books, Australia

First published by Benchmark Press 2004

Yardil is still available from the publisher's website even though it is an older title and isn't showing, so send an email from their website to place your order.

What people are saying

Yardil is the world's first picture book inspired by the Kalasha people.  Author Rosanne Hawke and her family visited the Kalasha in their Rumbur Valley in Chitral in the then North West Frontier Province (now Khyber Puktunkhwa) in Pakistan and was inspired to write a story about a girl called Shazia who wanted a snow leopard so badly she ventured into the mountain forest to find one.

Award winning illustrator, Elizabeth Stanley has evoked the extreme starkness of a high mountain winter in her beautiful crayon illustrations.