The Elephant and the Piano

An incredible and uplifting true story about how music has healed troubled elephants in a sanctuary in Thailand.

Some stories are true. Others are make-believe. And some true stories are so amazing that it seems they must be make-believe even when they are not...

This is one of those stories.

In a sanctuary in Thailand lived an elephant called Bonti. Short-tempered and destructive, Bonti was alone - the other elephants (and humans) knew to keep their distance. But when a musician came to play the piano for Bonti, something incredible happened...

The Elephant and the Piano tells the spectacular true story of Paul Barton and the elephants who loved to hear him play.

Colette Hiller is a writer, arts producer and mother of twins. Her arts projects have reached hundreds of thousands of participants - she is the woman who put pianos and ping-pong tables in countless locations across the UK, and is also the mind behind the hit Talking Statues project. Her children's rhymes have been featured on BBC Words and Pictures and her children's LP, Applehead, has been a hit with kids across the world, selling over 50,000 copies. An advocate of early learning, Colette believes that even very young children are receptive to the joy of wordplay. She taught her own twins to read by the time they were three.

Nabila Adani lives in Jakarta and enjoys illustrating different cultures around the world. She originally studied Industrial Product Design at Bandung Institute of Technology earning her degree in 2013, yet found her way into illustration later in life. She briefly worked as a product designer in Japan and Indonesia before moving to the United States to study children's book illustration. Now, back in Jakarta, she also holds art classes and grows mini libraries for kids near her home.