AS IN THE LONG AGO

  You might think that, having read all 84 Carnegie Medal winning books, I would be able to tell you how to write a Carnegie Medal winning book. Sadly, I can't. But if winning the Carnegie is your aim in life then I can give you a few pointers, starting with a few things not to do: Don't write non-fiction books. Despite what it says on the Carnegie website you have virtually no chance of winning with facts. Don't write poetry (unless you're prepared to turn your poetry into a novel - see below!). No poetry collection has ever won the Carnegie. Don't write fiction for 5-8 year olds. This vitally important area of children's reading experience has been almost entirely neglected by the judging panels over the years. Any one of the books in Alan Garner's  Stone Book Quartet , for example, would have deserved to win, but they weren't even shortlisted. Jane Gardam committed both this error and the next one when she had two books highly commended in the same ye...

The 2023 Carnegie winner was  The Blue Book of Nebo  by Manon Steffan Ros. This novel was originally written in Welsh and then 'adapted from the Welsh' by its author. When it won the Carnegie I saw it described as the first 'novel in translation' to have won the award, but that's not really accurate because, when she came to create an English language version of her story, Manon Steffan Ros found herself compelled to change important parts of the book. In an interview with Gary Raymond for  Wales Art Review  she describes why she had to do this.  In the original, a mother and her son are isolated survivors in a post-apocalyptic world. Each of them records their thoughts on the blank pages of a book they find in an abandoned house, a book Dylan calls The Blue Book of Nebo. In the book Dylan, the son, records what he remembers of their life together since 'The End' and his mother, Rowenna, talks about the time before 'The End' and about her own experie...

 It might say something about Katya Balen's 2022 Carnegie winner  October, October  that I've spent more time thinking about the parents in the story than about October herself, the protagonist and narrator. Or, more likely, it says something about me. But it occurs to me that the way parents are depicted in the procession of Carnegie winners over more than 80 years is interesting in itself. Great cover by Angela Harding Before I get to that though I should say that I did enjoy  October, October.  The book is written in an intense and often poetic style, especially at the beginning. A kind of stream-of-conciousness pours out of October, and you have to give the author a bit of leeway here, as she's trying to convey the heightened emotional state of the young narrator in language that it's hard to believe an eleven-year-old, even a precocious one, would have at her command.  Eleven-year-old October lives off-grid in the woods with her father. Her mother wasn...

  A dozen Carnegie winners. Look Both Ways  by Jason Reynolds won in 2021 On his website Jason Reynolds has a film,  Dear Dreamer , (there's a link lower down) which was produced 'in collaboration with the hardworking students, educators and dreamers of Atlanta.' In the film he says 'I think I just want to create work which makes young people feel cared for.' This reminded me of Elizabeth Acevedo's statement that 'I hold young people more tenderly,' (than adult readers). She was suggesting, I think, that in her adult work she is more honest—things are less likely to turn out well there. She allows more hope to younger readers.  Jason Reynolds means something different, or maybe something extra, because he does show great tenderness towards his characters. Bad things happen but people make it through by caring for each other. The extra thing he's saying is that by writing about the lives of people just like his readers he is caring for them. 'I wa...

  Elizabeth Acevedo has a story she tells about rats. And a poem. The story concerns a creative writing professor (and poet) who tells her that rats are not noble enough creatures to be the subject of an ode, and she needs to get more experience. You can watch Acevedo tell the story and deliver the poem on YouTube, but here's a few lines from   Rat Ode. Because you may be inelegant, simple, a mammal bottom-feeder, always fricking famished, little ugly thing that feasts on what crumbs fall from the corner of our mouths, but you live uncuddled, uncoddled, can’t be bought at Petco and fed to fat snakes because you’re not the maze-rat of labs: pale, pretty-eyed, trained. Elizabeth Acevedo is not going to be told what it is OK to write about. Her novel,  The Poet X,  which won the Carnegie medal in 2019 is the story, told in a series of poems, of 15 year old Xiomara, a Dominican American growing up in New York City. Xiomara has a troubled relationship with her very religi...

In an interview  that you can watch on her website  Geraldine McCaughrean described the origin of her book  Where the World Ends  which won the Carnegie Medal in 2018. Her daughter had visited St Kilda and returned with a head full of anecdotes about the island archipelago, the most remote in the British Isles. One of those anecdotes concerned something that happened in 1727. A small party of boys and men had crossed from the main island, Hirta, to a sea stack called Stac an Armin which is also known as the Warrior Stac, to catch wild fowl. They were ferried across on the island's only boat and expected to be picked up again after three weeks or so. But no one came, and they were marooned there for nine months with no idea why the boat had not returned to take them home. In fact, as Geraldine McCaughrean says in the interview, this anecdote consisted of only two sentences. No one knows what actually happened on that entirely barren spike of rock during those nine mon...

I read a lot of fiction. SF, thrillers, detective fiction, literary fiction, all kinds of stuff. In none of it do I find rape, murder, genocide and war occurring so regularly as in the Carnegie Medal winners I've been reading in the last few months. This month I've read  Buffalo Soldier  by Tanya Landman, 2015 winner (rape, lynching, murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, American Civil War, Indian Wars) and  Salt to the Sea  by Ruta Sepetys, 2017 winner (rape, murder, ethnic cleansing, maritime disaster with thousands of deaths, WW2). Did I enjoy them? Not really. Is enjoyment even an appropriate response to these novels? Well, probably not. Are they children's books? No. So why, then, are they not adult books? (Not that that is even a category). The subject matter is at least as extreme as most adult fiction that I read. I'm beginning to suspect that an important distinguishing feature of YA fiction is that it lacks  complexity.  I know that's a ridiculous o...