As journalist Benjamin Hall reported from war zones around the world, he carried a toy hedgehog that his daughters had given him: a small companion that “sent messages” back to them—videos and postcards letting them know he was safe. When Hall was grievously injured in Ukraine in 2022, the hedgehog was tucked inside his body armor, and stayed with him throughout his recovery, a journey that inspired his two nonfiction books, Saved (2023) and Resolute (2025). Along the way, he also decided that the little creature deserved a story of its own, and the result is a picture book called Read All About It!, illustrated by Martina Motzo (HarperCollins), in which an aspiring hedgehog journalist saves his community. PW spoke with Hall while he was vacationing in Morocco with his wife and four daughters—ages 10, eight, six, and one—about how storytelling was essential to his recovery, why journalism matters more than ever, and getting plot advice from his kids.
Writing a children’s book is a world away from being a war correspondent or a writer of nonfiction books. How did you decide to write a picture book?
There are so many answers. to be honest. First of all, I have read countless children’s books with my own daughters—it’s always been part of our life. And then family became really important to me when I was injured. I had worked a lot. I was away for stories. That’s what I did. And part of me realized after I was injured, maybe I had it the wrong way round, and the family needed to come before absolutely everything else.
And then I started to think about every conflict I’ve ever covered. You go out there, you talk about the bangs and the bullets and the politics and all the finances. But the stories that you tell more than any are about the parents and their children and what they’re really going through.
The hedgehog was important for me in my recovery and my relationship with my girls. When I was in hospital, first in Germany, then in Texas at a military hospital, and I had all these facial injuries—I didn’t want my children to see that. It was the hedgehog who sent messages home until my face was healed up a bit. I thought this hedgehog should go off and do something else in the world.
I’m a journalist, and if you show me what’s going on, and I speak to a few people, I can write a book about it. But bubbling [a story] down into a short children’s book—it’s really difficult. I would talk to my children, saying, “What do you think the hedgehog should do? What would you like to read?” They would often come back to something like, “Well, I think there should be more fairies in it.” and “Well, maybe he should wear a top hat.”
I really wanted to convey the idea that you’ve got to stand up when things are not going well, and protect people. I tell my kids every day, if someone is doing something or putting someone down or someone’s not happy, it’s your responsibility to go up to them and say, “How can I help? What can we do?”
You don’t see a lot of picture books with a journalism theme. Why was it important to put that in the story?
Yeah, that’s interesting—the only other character I can think of who’s a journalist is Tintin, and I grew up reading all the Tintin books. I loved that he went off on adventures.
But more than anything, I think that communities are stronger because of journalists: because they told the truth, everyone understood what was going wrong, and they came together. We do live in a world right now where it is so difficult to find the real facts of what’s happening around the world. With social media, you never know quite what you’re watching, what the facts are. I became a journalist because I think we make the world a better place when we know what’s going on. How can we possibly improve our lives and our community if we don’t really understand what’s going on?
I like the idea that if someone reads this book at school, they’ll say, why don’t we all sit down as a class and write what the hedgehog did? Or let’s write a newsletter, the way the hedgehog did, or his dad did, at the newspaper. If you can incentivize just a few kids to go out there, tell stories, find out the truth, speak to more people, then I think that’s essential for us and for our future.
The little hedgehog’s father is also a journalist. How’s he feeling about his job security these days?
I think journalism is absolutely central, and you’re right, it is going through a fascinating period at the moment. We’re seeing job losses across the board. Everyone says that journalism is something that AI is going to wipe away. But I believe that’s not entirely true. Yes, some jobs are going to be lost, but there is no way that just having a list of facts and figures can convey what’s actually happening somewhere: [the experience of] speaking to someone, being there, the smells, the sights.
Every time I covered a story around the world, I would always go with an idea that I kind of knew what the story was like, and I was never right. There was always an angle I never expected. And I only knew that because I went there. So journalism is going to change a lot, but it cannot, and will not, disappear.
What’s next for you?
I think the hedgehog has a lot of places it can go, and there are so many messages I want to teach children. We live in a changing world. I got so much joy with my own children from books; if I can pass that on, that’s great.
Read All About It! by Benjamin Hall, illus. by Martina Motzo. HarperCollins, $21.99 Mar. 3 ISBN 978-0-0633-5754-9
