| Children's column: the awards that are too fatiguing |
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| Children's |
| Written by Nicolette Jones |
| Friday, 30 January 2009 10:41 |
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Last year, national newspapers were reluctant to commission an interview with the CILIP Carnegie Medal winner Philip Reeve because of what they called "awards fatigue". This was despite the fact that Reeve's Mortal Engines quartet is one of the most inventive and ambitious children's novel sequences of recent years. And even though his winning book, Here Lies Arthur, which took the legend of Camelot and retold it with Arthur as a bloodthirsty slob whose image was remade by Merlin as spin-doctor, was vivid, sensual, original and resonant with ideas that would make youngsters think about how history is made. The sister prize, the Greenaway Medal, won last year for the second time by the skilled and witty Emily Gravett, also went largely unexplored in the press, except for its excitement that she let her pet rats pee on the pages of Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears. This week the librarians who judge the Carnegie/Greenaway medals met again to choose this year's shortlists, not to be revealed until 24 April. Will their conscientious deliberations be considered once again not to be worth much in the way of reporting, in contrast, say, to the choices made this week by the Costa judges? If so, is it really because we have heard too much about prize-winning children's books? Maybe a test of fatigue would be to ask members of the public - or even just parents and teachers - to name any prize-winners of the past year. If they reel off names with the long-suffering ennui of people stating the obvious, they have obviously been too much bombarded, and we should cut back all coverage of all children's awards. If not, there might still be books worth spreading the word about.Regional accolades and the Medals aside, the grand total of children's prizes now consists of the Costa category shortlist, the Blue Peter Book Awards, the Red House Children's Book Awards (voted for by children) and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize (inevitably downplayed by other papers). Other than that we have prizes that specialise in certain areas of the genre: the Booktrust Early Years Awards, the Booktrust Teenage Prize, the Branford Boase (for a debut), the Marsh Award for children's books in translation, the Waterstone's Children's Book Prize (also for debuts) and, for the first time last year (since the Carnegie), the Roald Dahl Funny Prize and the Queen of Teen Prize. Perhaps this is felt to be a proliferation that eclipses the Orange, the Man Booker, the Samuel Johnson, the other Costa categories, the John Llewellyn Rhys, the Society of Authors awards (including the Encore, the Betty Trask, the Somerset Maugham...) and all those specialist Daggers and Nibbies and R & J votes. Perhaps the problem is the perennial failure of most of the media to recognise the value of children's books as literature. Or do the Carnegie and Greenaway fail to command enough respect because the librarian judges from the Youth Libraries Group are not trained critics? The Carnegie is the oldest established children's book prize - now 73, with the Greenaway 53 years old - and Carnegie winners have included Arthur Ransome, C S Lewis, Eve Garnett, Philippa Pearce and Rosemary Sutcliff, while in recent years it honoured such bestsellers as Jennifer Donnelly and Terry Pratchett. This suggests that librarians can judge both lasting merit and popular potential. And the Carnegie was notably the only prize that recognised Philip Pullman's Northern Lights in the year of its publication. The Carnegie/Greenaway panel consists of 12 judges, plus a Chair. They may not be academically trained critics, but they are experts: they spend their lives reading and talking to readers. The youngsters they are choosing the books for are not academics either. No other prize, for adults or children, has so many adjudicators. Sheer numbers suggest that anything enjoyed and appreciated unanimously - or even by the majority - is likely to resonate with a large number of other readers. And sitting in on the Carnegie judging, as I was privileged to do this week, I can say that there were insights - take a bow, Jake Hope and Julia Hale in particular - that would have held their own with any expressed on any judging panel, adult or children's, I have ever been part of. Some very good books may not have made the grade, and some individual passions may not have carried the day, but where there was consensus, it was because the books in question had undeniable quality. It's going to be a very strong shortlist. Let's hope somebody notices. Comments (3)
  written by adele geras, January 30, 2009
Hear hear and again, hear hear!! Everything you say is quite right and the thing that really gets to me is: no one puts the children's book on the same level as the others in something like the Costa. Apart from an article on the Guardian books blog by Julia Eccleshare about Michelle Magorian's book, Just Henry, the rest of the papers were silent and the category might as well not have existed at all. Carnegie and Greenaway? Fergeddaboutit! No one wants to know in the media. It's about time we had a tele programme that is as high-profile as Richard and Judy are to kick start a realization in people that some of the best books around are on the children's lists. Coverage of books for children by the main newspapers has shrunk and shrunk and your coverage in the Sunday Times, Nicolette, and Amanda Craig in the Times are two good deeds shining in a naughty world. Julia E in the Guardian does her very best but it seems to me that their coverage is far less than it used to be...
 written by alison doig, February 05, 2009
Robert Muchamore misses the point, I think. There are as he says many awards, local and national, where the children pick the books themselves. The Carnegie is like the Booker prize: it is specifically awarded on literary merit. Like the Booker judges, the Carnegie judges sometimes get it wrong and pick something worthy but largely unreadable, but the shortlists always contain some really good stuff, and the shadowing forums indicate a pretty wide readership. Nicolette's wider point is entirely valid. There is far too little serious critical discussion of children's literature in the media. The papers that do review, with some exceptions such as Amanda Craig in the Times, tend only to pick books that they like, so the overall effect is bland. The TES, which used to review children's books every week, now seems to ignore them altogether-didn't even cover the Carnegie/Greenaway last year-though there is regular coverage of websites. How can we encourage schools to value books highly and promote children's reading if the media at large seem to put so little value on it?
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Most of these were small local awards, but for a new author they were great ways of spreading the word about my books, getting used to speaking to large groups of kids and getting my picture in the local media.
They were also 100% awards where children voted for the winner (even if in many cases from a shortlist selected by adults).
One of the constant themes from the organizers of these awards was that they'd set them up because young people were frustrated with the Carnegie shadowing process in which pupils could read books selected by a panel of adults, which would then be voted on by a panel of adults.
This not only frustrates young readers who are asked to read six books with no vote at the end, it leads to lists of books that are often very clever, tremendously well written, but that tend to appeal to teachers and librarians far more than children.
I'm not saying all awards should cater only to the commercial end of the market. But everyone should remember that kids books are a niche. The upper-teen literary end of the market from which Carnegie shortlists are picked is a tiny niche within this niche.
It's unrealistic to expect these awards to generate significant media interest.