The Stone Soup Book of Animal Stories

Stone Soup is the international literary magazine and website publishing writing and art by young people under the age of 14. Founded in 1973, we have published more creative work by children than any other publisher, selecting the very best from thousands of submissions every year. The stories in this volume–one in our series of themed anthologies–were written by authors between the ages of 9 and 13, selected for publication in Stone Soup magazine. Since its beginning in 1973, Stone Soup has published art, poetry and short fiction springing from the imaginations of young writers and artists. Animals are important in children’s lives, and so they are an important theme in their creative lives, too.

In this collection we celebrate the diversity of the approaches our authors take to stories about animals, and in the process explore the emotions and meaning our relationships with them reveal. Each one of these stories has a particular animal at its heart—a pet, a wild creature, even a ghost—and every one explores a moment of understanding realized through that creature. Free or captive; real or imagined—the varied animals and the tales woven around them share a common thread: empathy. 

Our storytellers take us into the bodies and minds of animals and the bodies and minds of the humans that interact with them. They imagine themselves to be animals, secure or under threat; they describe the deep feelings evoked by closeness to an animal or the longing for a pet to care for; they put into words the sorrow felt at the loss of a furry companion; and they expose the love and the cruelty experienced by animals in our world. Above all, these stories seek to understand how animals experience the world, and how animals enrich our own experience of it. Some of them are sad, and some are celebratory. All of them will make you think again about the wonders of the creatures we share a world with. Read on to encounter stories of joy, freedom, courage, danger, loss, sorrow, adventure, and love, and to meet a few of the most memorable animals that have appeared in the pages of Stone Soup.