A Port Chalmers author/illustrator is over the moon after a Chinese publisher bought the rights to two of his children's books about a pig called Henry - or Henlee as he will be known in China.
David Elliot's latest success comes after the two books, Henry's Map (2013) and Henry's Stars (2015), were published in the United States and Taiwan.
Henry's Map is also published in Korea.
He found out the rights had been sold to a Shanghai-based publisher less than two weeks ago when he was contacted by his United States publisher Philomel Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
"They just emailed me and said the rights had been sold and congratulated me that Henry was going global.
"So that was really, really nice.''
He was not certain what made the books, which were published in New Zealand and Australia by Penguin Random House New Zealand, connect with people around the globe and in particular Asia.
"I'm uncertain why Henlee ... appeals to the Asian market.
"The books have a typical New Zealand farm setting, but they both concern questions about how we see the world that are pretty universal and can be easily used for education.''
The books were about perception and examined questions about "how kids look at the world''.
After getting an advance, he would get a percentage of each book sold.
Mr Elliott has been a full-time author/illustrator since leaving his position as an art teacher at Queen's High School in the late 1990s.
Originally, Henry started off as a "noisy little pig'' but as the story developed he morphed into a "very organised sort of pig'', whose catch phrase is "a place for everything and everything in its place''.
In Henry's Map, his attempts to organise his farmyard and animal friends into some sort of order end in confusion.
In Henry's Stars he is further frustrated when his companions are unable to see what he sees in the stars.
Henry's Map was selected by the School Library Journal in the US as one of the 20 best children's picture books of 2013.
