Enchanted Lion’s ‘The Dreamcrafter’ Launches Series of Mongolian Stories for Young Readers
The 19 hours of air travel from New York City to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, did not dissuade Claudia Zoe Bedrick, publisher of Enchanted Lion Books. Neither did her inability to speak Mongolian. In 2023, when a stranger emailed to invite her to a picture book workshop for Mongolian creators, rather than joining over Zoom, she opted for a weeklong stay in a country 6,300 miles away. That visit, she said, “introduced me to this whole other world I knew nothing about.” Now, three years later, the November publication of The Dreamcrafter—what Bedrick described as “the first imaginative picture book from Mongolia in translation”—launches ELB’s new Mongolian Voices series.
The invitation came from Mark Koenig, the country representative in Mongolia for the Asia Foundation, a nonprofit international development organization. TAF’s Let’s Read program, an early literacy initiative supporting books in local languages, had received funding from the Lorinet Foundation, prompting Koenig—the father of a young daughter, and a self-professed children’s book nerd—to think big. After searching Mongolian bookstores for local children’s books, though he found “signs of talent, fantastic stories, and different perspectives,” he said “it needed some nurturing.”
Koenig told PW, “We envisioned a fellowship to create career paths and encourage investment in—and love for—children's literature.” In the U.S., he said, “We have this ecosystem with our libraries, our publishing.” In Japan and Korea, the publishing culture is “an incredible asset to reading and language promotion and cultivating readers.” But in Mongolia, with a population under four million, high-quality children’s books couldn’t affordably be produced at scale. Koenig doesn’t blame the publishers. “The margins that they face in a small language environment means that they can’t survive,” he said.
A Children’s Book Creation Fellowship could close the gap. Though Koenig admitted, “I was never in that community before,” he contacted writers, illustrators, publishers in the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., “just cold calling them.” Their response—what he described as “an amazing outpouring of support from the international children’s literature community”—was beyond what he’d hoped for. The program came together with the assistance of Khaliun “Luna” Ganzorig, TAF’s program officer at the time, and Undraa Nergui, who took a lead in the three-month fellowship and served as translator.
Out of 70 candidates, 16 fellows were chosen. The 2023 inaugural fellowship included virtual lectures from creators Marianne Dubuc, Chris Haughton, Grace Lin; and an in-person writers retreat with program mentor Katrina Goldsaito. The program concluded with Bedrick’s visit, during which she provided feedback on manuscripts. Nergui, who translated drafts of stories into English, said, “I saw such range in the writing, some very poetic, some dreamy and full of wonder. One [piece] even used Mongolian riddles as storytelling.”
Simultaneously translating for Goldsaito and Bedrick during their respective visits, Nergui became “an absolute linchpin of the fellowship program,” Bedrick said, enabling real-time conversations between the professionals and the fellows. For her, those moments revealed “the storytelling potential that was already there. Between the very strong oral tradition, children growing up with stories, and multi-generational households—the culture was just awash with stories.”
Falling under The Dreamcrafter’s spell
Impressed that someone of Bedrick’s stature “would just pick up the phone and say, ‘Yes, I’ll help,’ ” Koenig was stunned by what happened next. Nergui recalled, “When Claudia wrote to us four to five months later and expressed interest in acquiring some of the manuscripts, we were mind-blown.” Bedrick committed to four projects, two from author-illustrators and two texts that she subsequently placed with illustrators. The first, The Dreamcrafter by author-illustrator Zoolbo Orgil, publishes on November 3. “Breaking this news to Zolboo and others, we were beyond excited,” Nergui said. “With Claudia’s editorial support, the story came to life as this beautiful and enchanting book.”
The titular character lives in an unnamed city, shaping dreams as tangible objects and creatures. One morning, she awakens to find they’ve escaped through an open window. Though she rarely leaves “the wondrous room in which she did her work,” as it’s described in the book, she ventures into the city and beyond to retrieve the missing dreams. Bold color, fine-line brushwork, and roughened, textured surfaces are indications that the illustrations are entirely hand-painted.
Orgil told PW, “The Dreamcrafter, her environment, lifestyle, and the nature of her work are a representation of my own life. Everything I learned in the fellowship about setting, character, plot, and pacing helped a lot.” For her undergraduate degree, Orgil studied Mongolian traditional drawing techniques, including Eastern art and thangka—“the painting of deities and Buddhist sacred narratives”—and used the same techniques for the book: “chalk and animal-based glue, and sandpaper and cloth to create an intentional distressed look.”
Translated by Bujinlkham Erdenebaatar, the spare text was challenging due to its simple yet precise narrative. Erdenebaatar learned “to listen closely to how English sounds, how word choice and sentence rhythm shape tone” while earning an MFA in creative writing and poetics at the University of Washington. “When I write in Mongolian, I often read a sentence aloud again and again, until I feel I have found the right rhythm. For a book this minimal, every word carries more weight.” Erdenebaatar sought “not only accuracy, but also simplicity, rhythm, and natural phrasing that allowed the language to sit beside the illustrations rather than compete with them.”
For Bedrick, The Dreamcrafter “just grabbed me,” she said. “I’m kind of of crazy about this Mongolia project,” so much so that Enchanted Lion Books has established the Mongolian Voices series, with the next three titles publishing in 2027, 2028, and 2029.
Nergui said that after the 2023 fellowship, “something sparked inside us. Luna Ganzorig and I were convinced that what Mongolian creators were making had international merit. The idea of agenting really started to take shape.” During a second fellowship in 2025, when another publisher praised the high quality of the manuscripts and artwork, “that was the final nudge.” Together, they launched Nomad Ink Agency in October 2025, participating in the Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, and the Asian Festival of Children’s Content in Singapore—seeding the ecosystem that Koenig and the Asia Foundation had hoped for.
