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Vegan Actor Natalie Portman Announces Debut Children’s Book

by Alex Bloom | March 2, 2020

Academy award-winning actress Natalie Portman recently announced her upcoming children’s book, Natalie Portman’s Fables. 

The book is slated for release on October 20 this year, and will consist of retellings of three classic fables accompanied by illustrations from artist Janna Mattia. 

The fables were retold to “emphasize empathy, inclusivity, and humor,” according to Portman’s website, and will include The Tortoise and the Hare, The Three Little Pigs, and City Mouse Country Mouse. 

In a letter Portman released preceding the book’s release, she discussed her inspiration for her telling of the tales, noting a difference in gender representation between books aimed at her daughter and books aimed at her son. 

“Storytelling is how we start practicing empathy—we feel for characters in stories as we might for ourselves or our own friends. If the entry point to empathy coincides with the all-male narratives, the idea is reinforced in both boys and girls that they must be conscious primarily of male feelings” she wrote. 

“I wanted to make the stories reflective of the actual world, where about half of the animal kingdom is female, and half is male, and some are neither or both” she went on. 

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Natalie Portman: Raising Awareness & Living Vegan

This inclusivity-focused children’s book isn’t Portman’s first foray into advocacy. She has been an outspoken supporter of gender equality and issues surrounding climate change, two causes that she connected in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

“It’s not an accident that women are treated in a different way in our society, and our Earth is called Mother Earth and it’s treated poorly” she said.

Portman became a vegetarian as a child and later adopted a vegan lifestyle. She also narrated and produced the 2017 documentary Eating Animals, which showed the impact of factory farming in terms of animal rights, climate change, and human welfare. 

Natalie Portman’s Fables are available to preorder in advance of its October release.

What’s your favorite children’s story and why? Let us know in the comments below!

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