Skip to main contentSkip to navigation

Children's book award shortlists offer contrast in veterans versus new talent

Jan Mark. Photo: Hachette Children's Books
Jan mark, who died earlier this year, is in the running for the Carnegie medal for the third time. Photo: Hachette Children's Books
Jan mark, who died earlier this year, is in the running for the Carnegie medal for the third time. Photo: Hachette Children's Books

A clash of titans in one section of the world's leading children's book prizes was offset yesterday by an invasion of relatively ungarlanded talent in the other.

Four out of five names in the shortlist for the Carnegie medal have won the award before. But none of the eight finalists for the £5,000 Kate Greenaway illustrators medal have held it previously.

The awards - uniquely, administered and judged by librarians - are more internationally respected than any others for the age group. The Carnegie, which was founded 69 years ago and carries no prize money, has been won in the past by authors ranging from Eleanor Farjohn to Noel Streatfield and CS Lewis.

When Philip Pullman was awarded the 1996 Carnegie for Northern Lights, the introductory instalment of his Dark Materials trilogy, it was treated as a clear signal that a new classic novelist had appeared on the scene.

This year's Carnegie finalists include the late Jan Mark, who has won it twice before, for Turbulence. The three who have won it once are David Almond, whose stories for older children are visions of love in shadowed places, for Clay; the bestselling Geraldine McCaughrean, whose official sequel to Peter Pan comes out this autumn, for The White Darkness; and the film writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, with Framed.

The newcomer is Mal Peet, an illustrator turned author from Norfolk. Tamar is his second novel.

When the Kate Greenaway medal - for illustrations for younger children - was launched 49 years ago, its first winner was Edward Ardizzone.

Among this year's finalists is Emily Gravett, an ex-traveller who is not long out of a Brighton University art course. She began drawing to stop herself "going up the walls" after moving off the road into a house when her daughter was born.

Her titles, Wolves, is one of two about the predators on the Greenaway shortlist. The second is David Roberts's Little Red: A Fizzingly Good Yarn, about a big bad wolf who discovers he prefers ginger beer to grannies, even though it makes him burp.

Also on the list are: Tony Diterlizzi, for Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You; Mini Grey, for Traction Man is Here; Oliver Jeffers, for Lost and Found; Dave McKean, for Mirrormask; Jane Ray, for Jimmy Ghost; and Rob Scotton for Russell the Sheep.

Their characters include an insomniac sheep, a rabbit fatally engrossed in a library book, and a penguin lost in the Antarctic.

The Carnegie medal was established in 1936 in memory of the philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie. The Scottish-born industrialist, who made his fortune in steel in the US, attributed his success to having had access to a library as a child.

The golden medal named after him may not endow its winners with the riches of some other literary prizes, but it does provide the winner with £500 worth of books to donate to a library of their choice.

Winners of both awards will be announced early next month.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/may/05/books.carnegiemedal2005
www.theguardian.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-27
249646
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:2OUIOHCT24LTZRUTMW575KTQUCOQKH7S
<urn:uuid:0e115aee-e43d-45d6-a5e5-85210439ba6d>
2022-06-26T21:32:31Z
146.75.33.111
text/html
sha1:AMSJYTK2IR64WPPXTGY5RNAXWTPCXS6A
<urn:uuid:abc6f7f6-11e2-428d-a7bd-13dc6b085a12>
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/may/05/books.carnegiemedal2005
response
<urn:uuid:51c90980-7dd2-431d-9d5e-1f2aefc029ea>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-27
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June/July 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-252
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.3-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/