The Carnegie from the Beginning March 2020
I’ve just started on a project that’s been in my mind ever since a friend in the Schools Library Service showed me a shelf in their offices containing all of the Carnegie medal winning books. I’ve started reading them all, from the beginning. I thought I ought to do this partly because there are quite a few names on the list that I had never heard of, to my shame. I'm not sure if this will be an occasional series or a monthly one, but this month I’ve read the first three winners. PIGEON POST (1936) by Arthur Ransome is the book of which his wife, Evgenia, said ‘it’s not very much worse than the worst of the others.’ She also told him, later that year, that WE DIDN’T MEAN TO GO TO SEA was ‘flat, not interesting, not amusing.’ Luckily for Ransome, hers was not the only opinion he listened to. However, it’s probably fair to say that PIGEON POST is not Ransome’s most successful book, and it was said that it won the inaugural Carnegie partly in recognition of the achievements ...