BfK Briefing - March 2001

EVENTS <!--break-->

Tell Me a Picture

The Children’s Laureate, Quentin Blake, has assembled an alphabetical anthology of 26 pictures with a sense of story at the National Gallery. Aimed at younger visitors, the exhibition aims to encourage them to engage with a wide range of imaginative images and explore the relationship between words and pictures in the telling of a story. It includes paintings from the National Gallery’s collection from such artists as Uccello and Edward Hopper. Open until 17 June. Admission free. The exhibition is accompanied by a book by Quentin Blake.

The Federation of Children’s Book Groups National Conference 2001

This conference is being held in Dundee (the first time it has been held in Scotland)from 30 March to 1 April 2001 at the West Park Centre. The conference theme is ‘Freedom’, a ‘particularly appropriate theme that reflects the new political order in Scotland and is also a good broad subject’. Authors who will be participating include Sharon Creech, Aidan Chambers, Julie Bertagna, Anne Fine, Philip Ardagh, Diana Wynne Jones, Theresa Breslin, Paul Jennings, Berlie Doherty, Debi Gliori, Diana Hendry, Chris de Lacey, Harry Horse, Linda Newbery and Chloe Rayban. Further information from Olivia Menzies or Caroline Beaton on 01738 476200. To book, contact Amanda Hunt, St John’s High School, Harefield Road, Dundee DD3 8EY.



NEWS

Fickling moves list

David Fickling has moved his list, David Fickling Books, from Scholastic to Random House in both the UK and the US. Titles will be published simultaneously on both continents. Fickling will be publishing up to 20 books a year including picture books, poetry and fiction. His authors include Philip Pullman.

Ladybird leaves Nottingham

Ladybird’s Nottingham office is to close and the brand (owned by Penguin) will move to London where it will merge with Dorling Kindersley’s creative departments, now also part of the Penguin stable. The integration of DK and Ladybird with Penguin UK has resulted in 300 redundancies.



PRIZES

2000 Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year

Coram Boy by Jamila Gavin (Mammoth, £5.99, reviewed on page ??) is the winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year. The judges, Kate Agnew, Lucy Hughes-Hallett and Michael Morpurgo, who were joined by school students Eleanor Pullan and Adam Usden, described it as ‘a far-reaching, totally engrossing historical novel with life well beyond the pages of the book and superb narrative control over the complex inter-twining stories within. Brilliant, moving and ultimately completely compelling.’

On the shortlist were Heaven Eyes by David Almond (Hodder Children’s Books, £10), The Seeing Stone by Kevin Crossley-Holland (Orion, £10.99) and Troy by Adèle Geras (Scholastic Press, £14.99).

The Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation

This biannual award which aims to draw attention to the quality and diversity of translated fiction has been won by David Grossman’s Duel (Bloomsbury), translated from Hebrew by Betsy Rosenberg. The shortlisted books were Jostein Gaarder’s The Frog Castle (Orion Children's Books), translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson; Reinhardt Jung’s Dreaming in Black & White (World Mammoth), translated from the German by Anthea Bell; and Dirk Walbrecker’s Greg (World Mammoth), translated from the German by Anthea Bell. The judges were Patricia Crampton, Wendy Cooling and Elizabeth Hammill.

Tam-Tam J’aime Lire ‘Book of the Year’

The French edition of Geoffrey Malone’s Torn Ear , a dramatic and compelling story about the life of a young fox (published in the UK by Hodder Children’s Books), has won the Tam-Tam J’aime Lire ‘Book of the Year’ for 7-10 year olds, the French equivalent of the Smarties Award. The award gives over 1000 French school children the opportunity to vote for their favourite book. Malone is the first British author to win this award.

Regional Prizes

Sheffield Children’s Book Award

The overall winner of this award, chosen by young readers, is Susan Gates’s Cry Wolf (Scholastic) which also won the Shorter Novels category. The Picture Books Category winner is Ian Whybrow and Adrian Reynolds’s Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs (David & Charles) and the Longer Novels category winner is J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury).

North East Book Award 2000

Mary Hooper’s Megan (Bloomsbury) has won this year’s North East Book Award. The winner was chosen by Year 10 students from schools across the North East who exchanged their view by enthusiastic e-mail and videoconference links before voting online and creating a Book Award website to demonstrate the perfect synergie of books and ICT. The runner-up was Carnegie Book Award winner, Postcards from No Man’s Land (Red Fox) by Aidan Chambers.



PEOPLE

According to The Sunday Times , the author of the Harry Potter books, J K Rowling , who once lived on £70 a week, has now earned at least £35m from sales of her books. It is thought that they have sold 74 million copies worldwide. Merchandising deals may make Ms Rowling even richer.

Sally Gritten has been appointed Managing Director of Quarto Children’s Books. She was previously a consultant for Pleasant Company UK.

Margaret Conroy has been appointed Publishing Director of Hodder Children’s Books.



Obituary

CATHERINE STORR

1913-2001

Elaine Moss writes…

Long before the modish terms bibliotherapy and feminism found their way into the critique of children's literature, Catherine Storr, who died in January at the age of 87, introduced these elements quite naturally into her stories for young children and their older siblings. In 1955 Faber published Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf and in 1958 Marianne Dreams , both of which are now classics of the period and still widely read and enjoyed. A doctor and psychotherapist (she had believed she could never earn her living as a writer) and the mother of three daughters, Catherine wrote about childhood fears and their resolution from a deep experience tinged with delicious humour; the Stupid Wolf is consistently outwitted by commonsensical, often compassionate, Polly; and Marianne's drawings and the dreams they inspire arising from her illness as well as her fractious nature, have a ‘magic’ potential of release. A literary descendant of Mrs Molesworth and Frances Hodgson Burnett, Catherine Storr carried the torch of excellence in writing for children over into its second flowering.



Obituary

Adrian Henri

1932-2000

John Peel writes…

The University of Liverpool’s Precinct newsletter wrote of Adrian Henri that: ‘For the City of Liverpool and its people he is a powerful symbol of its artistic diversity and riches and, over the years, he has been a splendid ambassador of much that it represents.’ All that and more is true but, more importantly, he was also a lovely man. His death has been a reminder, as deaths so often are, that we should treasure those we love more than, perhaps, we do. We should ’phone, e-mail, visit. Adrian was with my wife, Sheila, and I when the first Americans walked on the moon. He was performing, with his band, the Liverpool Scene, at the most frightening concert I have ever attended, a CND benefit in East London in the late 1960s, fearlessly inviting an extremely hostile audience to dance something called the woo-woo as they pelted the stage with bottles, stones and mud. Sheila and I were excited to learn that Adrian was to sit with us at a recent degree congregation but sadly he was too ill to attend. He died the following day. As I said, he was a lovely man.