Children's books: 8-12

Roald Dahl Funny prize shortlists writer's collaborator

Quentin Blake, the illustrator best known for his collaborations with Roald Dahl, is a finalist in both categories of the award honouring the author
Quentin Blake
In line for a prize ... Quentin Blake. Photograph: Rex Features

The shortlist for this year's Roald Dahl Funny prize, set up to honour the late author's comic writing for children, has shortlisted his best-known collaborator, Quentin Blake, in both its categories.

The prize was set up two years ago by the author Michael Rosen as part of his children's laureateship and seeks to celebrate the books that make children laugh. Blake, the former children's laureate who worked with Dahl from 1975 until the author's death in 1990, features in the six-and-under category with Angelica Sprocket's Pockets, which he wrote and illustrated. He also features in the seven-to-14 category with Mr Stink, written by David Walliams and illustrated by Blake. Last year their collaboration on Walliams's debut book about a cross-dressing schoolchild, The Boy in the Dress, was also shortlisted.

Michael Rosen, chair of judges, said "purely from a personal point of view, of all the fantastic shortlist, it's nice to see Quentin here simply because I've benefited so much from my collaboration with him. They are both wonderful pieces of his work. In his illustration he is able to capture gesture in the way that a mime artist captures gesture – there's a particular kind of exaggerated quality that Quentin is able to replicate on the page. But that's not all he does. In Angelica Sprocket's Pockets he's returned to some of the themes from Mister Magnolia and it made my little boy both laugh and gasp at the same time. That's a fantastic thing to be able to do and we should never underestimate the power of an author to make a child laugh and gasp. These moments that children attach to books live on for the rest of their lives."

While Blake's Angelica Sprocket is a woman, albeit one with magically capacious pockets, his competitors in the younger age group all feature animals or monsters. One Smart Fish by Chris Wormell is a picture book about evolution while Dogs Don't Do Ballet makes a hero of a pug in a tutu who saves the day at the Royal Ballet. There are more canine laughs in Dog Loves Books by Louise Yates while goats and tiger cubs are the order of the day in Jeanne Willis's The Nanny Goat's Kid. Lee Weatherley's The Scariest Monster in the World tackles a bad case of the hiccups.

"There are indeed lots of dogs and other animals," said Rosen. "The great advantage of animals is that they can be a surrogate child but do lots of things a child can't. If a dog in a book engages with human they can still retain their dogginess and that can be funny too. Animals in children's books are like puppets – you can put voices and thoughts in them that you can't put in human beings. Part of the trick of all fiction is playing with proximity and distance and animals allow you to do that."

In the older age group, Walliams and Blake are up against a contender for the Guardian children's fiction prize – Eva Ibbotson with her tale of a hag, a troll and a wizard trying to rescue a recalcitrant princess in The Ogre of Oglefort. Also shortlisted is The Clumsies Make a Mess by Sorrel Anderson; Einstein's Underpants and How They Saved the World by Anthony McGowan; and The Incredible Luck of Alfie Pluck by Jamie Rix. Louise Rennison, a former Queen of Teen award winner and author of the Georgia Nicholson series that began with Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, is in the running with the first in a new series, Withering Tights. It features 14-year-old boy-mad Talullah Casey and her summer spent at a performing arts college in Yorkshire.

The winner of each category will be awarded their prize of £2,500 in a ceremony in London on November 17. The prize has been previously won by Andy Stanton (of Mr Gum fame) and Philip Ardagh with Grubtown Tales: Stinking Rich and Just Plain Stinky. Ardagh takes his place on the judging panel this year, along with Rosen, the illustrator Bruce Ingman, journalist Nicolette Jones and comedian Shappi Khorsandi.

Khorsandi said that "judging the shortlist was a ridiculous amount of fun, and not just because of the funny looks I got on trains sitting reading a pile of books which were clearly not aimed at my age group. Reading the very high standard of children's books reminded me how I came to love reading in the first place."

Today's best video

Today in pictures
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/17/roald-dahl-funny-prize-shortlists/print
www.theguardian.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-48
118433
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:YEK6AR2NKGGKEKGWEJEAWFRG2ETR54HA
<urn:uuid:114b974a-5ee9-45fd-b060-20ec33d97921>
2015-11-28T00:49:49Z
23.235.46.67
sha1:VU5AT3LYOUZXD34MMHXZI4HHIBO3BRDG
<urn:uuid:58de324c-403f-4ac1-b540-cc2aba3c5722>
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/17/roald-dahl-funny-prize-shortlists/print
response
<urn:uuid:760e5f1a-c587-45d6-9f6f-069269d7e144>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-71-132-137.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-48
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for Nov 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf