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Here on this blog you can find posts about Carnegie Medal winning books, starting in 1936 with Arthur Ransome's Pigeon Post. Older posts deal with education and all sorts of other things. You can also find pages about the children's books I've written, and a little bit about me. All the illustrations on the Books pages are by Emily May. I have another blog about my bike trip around the North Sea in 2015. There's a link in the sidebar. Enjoy your visit!

Death and the Carnegie Medal

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  Death has always been a presence in Carnegie Medal winning books. The third winner, Noel Streatfeild's  The Circus is Coming  begins like this: "Peter and Sarah were orphans. When they were babies their father and mother were killed in a railway accident, so they came to live with their aunt." This is an extreme example of how children's authors get rid of the parents to allow the children some agency. Roald Dahl did a very similar thing in  James and the Giant Peach  although he waited until the second paragraph to dispatch James's parents by means of an angry rhinoceros. Both Streatfeild and Dahl are just clearing the ground before they start their stories, cutting the protagonists free from those pesky parents. Books like  The Lantern Bearers  and  Tulku  do the same thing in a more organic way, but although people die in both these books, death is not central to the stories. There are other winners with high body-counts, like Ronald Welch's  Knight Crusa

Believability

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All fiction is a kind of conspiracy between author and reader. The author pretends that what they are writing is true and the reader pretends to believe them. I know there's a lot more to it than that—the author probably has something they want to say through shaping the events and characters in their story and the reader may be searching for some kind of truth, or a new way of looking at things, and what is truth anyway? But for the whole thing to work the reader has to be able to convince themselves while they are reading that what they are reading is true.  So when I started reading Meg Rosoff's Carnegie Winner  Just in Case  and discovered that the central character is named Justin Case, that contract between the writer and this particular reader was immediately undermined. I mean, Justin's parents seem quite ineffectual, but I couldn't believe that  any  parents would deliberately do that to their child. Justin lives in a weird world. It's a world where toddler

One Eye on the Grown-up

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What interested me most, when I started reading the Carnegie Medal winning books from the beginning, was the prospect of discovering books and authors I'd never heard of, or who I'd heard of but had never read. I spent a lot of time, early on, exploring the backgrounds and connections of some of those authors, and I'm glad I did, especially in the case of Walter de la Mare whose novels,  Memoirs of a Midget  and  The Three Royal Monkeys  are truly extraordinary books which I doubt are much read today. Reading those early winners was a kind of literary archaeology, but now that I've entered the new millennium I'm not having quite as much fun, and I'm wondering why? I am a confirmed re-reader of books I love. I don't know if this is a bad thing or not, but after reading a dozen or so new books I usually find myself going to the bookshelves and taking down a John le CarrĂ©, for example, or a thriller that I remember enjoying but read long enough ago to have forg

Lost for Words

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  I've read more than 60 Carnegie Medal winning books now, and I've found none of them more difficult to write about than Beverley Naidoo's  The Other Side of Truth . It belongs to a loose category of winners that appear to originate in an author's desire to educate their readers. Social realism I suppose. I'd include Berlie Doherty's books here, and probably Melvin Burgess's Junk. It's not surprising that adults writing for children should be interested in the effect their writing has on those readers. Here's Beverley Naidoo on why she writes: "I am frequently asked, 'Have you a message in what you write?' My reply is that writing fiction is quite different from declaiming from a soapbox or through a microphone. I do not write to deliver a 'message'. Yet I believe passionately in the importance of literature that engages with life and our moral human universe." The Other Side of Truth  shines a light on the abuses of the mi

Why I Write

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  Eagle-eyed readers of this blog may have noticed that it is a long time since I published a children’s book. Lately I’ve been working on sorting out my large archive of photographs of Scotland which I’ve taken over the past 50 years and more. I’ve been compiling the images into a book, and putting them into context, because photographs of mountains and islands and lochs and people mean very little unless you know when and why and how they were taken, and who the people are.  Ellie on the Isle of Skye, March 2003 From the perspective of what I suppose I must call age I feel as though I am viewing my life from a mountaintop, and I see how some of those now distant events cluster closely together, and how there are periods where the ordinary business of life goes on, untroubled by big events.     I decided to stop teaching full-time and try to write children’s books in 1993. Just as I did so, my wife’s, Ellie’s, mother had a stroke which changed her life  and ours too —she spent the res

World War Two Wins the Carnegie—Again

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  Postcards From No Man's Land  by Aidan Chambers won the Carnegie in the year 2000. It's an important book in the history of the Carnegie because it's the first to address homosexuality and bi-sexuality directly, and it also contains extensive discussions about assisted dying, but I found it hard going, chiefly because I couldn't quite believe in the central character, Jacob. Chambers says in the Afterword of my edition of the book that he deliberately wrote Jacob's story in the third person in order to create some distance between reader and character. The book's second, linked storyline about a Dutch girl who falls for a wounded English airman during the battle of Arnhem is told in the first person. Aidan Chambers puts it like this: "We live intimately with Geertrui, whereas we only travel alongside Jacob as a witnessing companion. And I suppose that's why so many readers have told me how much more moved they are by Geertrui's story than they are

Realism and Magic Realism

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  Junk  by Melvin Burgess is a realistic novel that actually feels real and truthful. The book was awarded the Carnegie Medal in 1996 and it's hard to imagine anything more different from its predecessor,  Northern Lights . It deals with addiction, teenage prostitution, and domestic violence, which is why it was controversial, but it presents a far more developed, rounded and convincing  picture of the lives it describes than did  Stone Cold , Robert Swindells' earlier winning novel about teen homelessness. It is above all a novel of character, but like all the best books it's about many other things too, and most importantly about love. I'd read  Junk  before, many years ago, and it was its grim realism that I chiefly remembered. I think perhaps I didn't read it properly, because  Junk  offers hope as well as grimness, and even the grimness is done with subtlety and understanding. And it's crucial that along with the pin-sharp depiction of the addict's endl