‘Our human world is shaped and maintained by acting and creating, but also to a large extent by storytelling. Our societies profoundly depend on stories and our ability to convey them to each other, to endow ourselves to hear and understand them, to understand each other that way. For that reason, every individual story and all the stories of this world, the totality of all individual stories, are extremely important as they cultivate our humanity, as they design the conditions we live in. This is because storytelling is both a way of creating the world and conveying experiences, emotions, fears and hopes. For that reason, it is extremely important to hear different and diverse voices of young people as early in life as possible, and it is particularly important for young people to hear them. It is important because that way, by reading and hearing stories, they encounter other experiences, the experiences that are sometimes distant from their own, spatially, culturally, emotionally or in any other aspect. Only by hearing such stories we as people can truly practice empathy, tolerance and true coexistence.

In a broader sense, all literature, due to the manifold interests of those writing it, and consequently due to its creative potential, can be considered inclusive. Despite that, especially when it comes to literature for children and teenagers, often it takes a lot of effort to find good texts and illustrations that focus on stories of truly shifted points of view, stories of young people struggling with their inner worlds or external, personal and social obstacles. Such stories about different than usual characters, situations, emotions, fears, convictions and expectations, stories told from minority perspectives, unprotected by the likeminded mass, are inclusive stories in a more specific sense.

One might ask, why would someone who doesn’t live in such situations and might never know anyone living in them ever read such stories? Let me venture two possible answers, convinced that, once you start thinking about it, each of you will think of other alternatives.

First, it is highly improbable that in our extremely networked society of expressive mobility we’re not going to encounter a person of racial or sexual orientation different from ours, that in this world where people are so mobile we’re not going to meet a person engrossed in their world limited by disability, who would open new horizons to us by saying that “writing is a special kind of movement, because writing takes you places you couldn’t go because of your physical limitations.” And second, stories are told, listened to and read for this very particular reason: to meet and see what we might identify with and what we otherwise would perhaps never encounter. We do it because we are humans, curious and interested in other humans, capable of designing our lives and the lives of those close to us and those we can reach by means of words.'