AS IN THE LONG AGO

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 Carré, for example, or a thriller that I remember enjoying but read long enough ago to have forg...

  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...

  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 our...

  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...

  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 t...