AS IN THE LONG AGO

  Jacket by Jim Russell Jan Mark's first novel,  Thunder and Lightnings , was published in 1976 and won the Carnegie Medal in 1977. It is, for several reasons, one of my favourite children's books. It's not perfect—Jan's scorn for certain idiocies of the English education system occasionally bursts out a little too obviously—but it is a condensed, often funny, and quietly moving study of an encounter between two boys from very different backgrounds: Andrew the child of middle-class, educated professionals, an incomer to the Norfolk countryside, and Victor,   a Norfolk farm-worker's son. I lived in the Norfolk countryside for forty years, and my mother lives there still. In fact, until recently she had her hair done every week in Coltishall, the village that gives its name to RAF Coltishall where the Lightning aircraft in the story are based. Generations of my mother's family come from Norfolk and I am still amazed that after such short acquaintance Jan Mark got ...

  It was 1986 and I was in my first year of teaching when Robert Westall's novel,  The Machine Gunners , got me into a bit of trouble. I'd trained as a teacher in the mid-1970s, at about the same time as Westall won the Carnegie Medal (in 1975) with his first published novel, and I may well have come across the book at that time. I didn't go into teaching after I qualified, partly because of the extraordinary careers advice session at the end of our course when the visiting speaker told us that most, probably all, of us had no chance of getting a job when we left, not because we were terrible teachers, but because there were no jobs. Shortly after that I found myself busy being a dad, and I scraped a living for a few years as a silversmith and part-time playgroup supervisor, so it wasn't until 1986 that I started teaching. And by that time  The Machine Gunners  had been made into a BBC TV series which was first shown in 1983. So there I was, teaching a class of 30 ch...

  One of Charles Keeping's many fine walls graces the cover of the 1974 winner of the Carnegie Medal, Mollie Hunter's  The Stronghold . The wall in question is the wall of a  broch , and the invention and purpose of these still somewhat mysterious structures, which are found only in the highlands and islands of Scotland, is the subject of Mollie Hunter's novel.  A  broch  is a tall, tapering tower, built using drystone walling techniques with galleries and staircases built into the massive walls. Any account you read of the opinions and suppositions of archaeologists about  brochs  is peppered with the words  perhaps  and  possibly. Possibly  there were hundreds of these structures and  probably  they were all built between 100BCE and 100CE. Anything Mollie Hunter could imagine could possibly be true, but in order to write her book she had to create a complete, complex society with its religion, its power-struggles an...

  'We are all of us,' says Penelope Lively, 'not just what we are now but what we have been.' She was writing about the origins of her 1973 Carnegie Medal winning novel   The Ghost of Thomas Kempe .  I live in London now, and I have done for nearly a decade, but before that I lived for forty years in the countryside, in Yorkshire for a bit but mostly in Norfolk. In a sense I've come full-circle because I was born in a hospital in Islington and lived for the first four years of my life in a top-floor flat in Hendon, 200 metres from the A406 North Circular Road, and a half-hour bike ride from where I live today. Here's a photo of the block of flats that I took yesterday. It's almost unchanged by nearly seventy intervening years, though the cars passing by look very different.  It was here that I looked out of a window, the third from the right on the top floor in the photo, to watch for my dad arriving home in the car he'd acquired in his new role as a tra...

  The book which won the Carnegie Medal in 1972 is one which should give hope to all budding authors, especially to those who have been rejected by publishers, and even more especially to those who have been rejected multiple times by both publishers—some say 7, some say 30—and agents, because that's what happened to   Watership Down   by Richard Adams. It was ridiculously long; it had obscure quotes from Tennyson and Malory for chapter headings and it was about a bunch of talking rabbits. Of course they rejected it.  And then Rex Collings decided to publish the book, risking his own money in the venture, and the venture was wildly successful.  Watership Down  won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize. It was subsequently taken on by Macmillan in the USA, translated into 18 languages, filmed and made into TV series more than once. The movie even spawned a No1 hit single in Art Garfunkel's  Bright Eyes  although Richard Adams hated th...

  I really didn't enjoy reading   Josh,   the winner of the 1971 Carnegie Medal. The story is told through the eyes, imagination and paranoia of Josh, the almost 14-year-old central character, and he is so annoying, so emotional, so given to over-reaction, that he makes for very uncomfortable company. This is not to say that it's a bad book. In fact it's unforgettable, but I wouldn't want to read it again. And I did try, because I found   this enthusiastic review by John Dougherty   from 2012 and I wondered if we'd read the same book. But it was no good. It just wasn't for me. Ivan Southall was a major voice in children's literature in the 1960s and 1970s and his books for young adults were widely read. He was the first, and so far the only, Australian to win the Carnegie. After fighting in the RAF during WW2 he wrote a series of adventure stories about a daring pilot called Simon Black during the 1950s, before turning to realistic, character-driven tales of...