BfK News: July 2002
NEWS
The Centre for the Children’s Book
Work is about to begin on the Grade II listed flour mill and adjacent buildings in Newcastle that will be home to the Centre for the Children’s Book. There will be a visitors’ centre, gallery and workshop spaces. The Centre is due to open in 2004.
Ahead of Madonna
Harry Potter author J K Rowling is in the 147th place on the Sunday Times Rich List with a £226m fortune. She has jumped 379 places from her position last year and is now ahead of Madonna and Guy Ritchie.
AWARDS INTERNATIONAL
Hans Christian Andersen Awards 2002
The Andersen Award Jury of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) has announced that Aidan Chambers has won the Author Award and Quentin Blake the Award for Illustration. The Hans Christian Andersen Awards are presented every two years to an author and illustrator whose complete works have made a lasting and significant contribution to the world of children’s books. 28 authors were nominated from around the world. The two runners-up were Bart Moeyaert (Belgium) and Bjarne Reuter (Denmark). 27 illustrators were nominated. The runners-up were Rotraut Susanne Berner (Germany), Daihachi Ohta (Japan) and Grégoire Solotareff (France).
NATIONAL
The Carnegie and Greenaway Shortlists
The shortlisted titles for the Carnegie Medal are Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog (Bloomsbury), Peter Dickinson’s The Ropemaker (Macmillan), Eva Ibbotson’s Journey to the River Sea (Macmillan), Elizabeth Laird’s Jake’s Tower (Macmillan), Geraldine McCaughrean’s The Kite Rider (OUP), Geraldine McCaughrean’s Stop the Train (OUP), Terry Pratchett’s Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (Doubleday) and Virginia Euwer Wolff’s True Believer (Faber). Chair of judges, Karen Usher, said: ‘This list represents the quality of books published for young people in 2001 and the depth and breadth of writing available.’
The shortlisted titles for the Greenaway Medal are Jez Alborough’s Fix-it Duck (Collins), Russell Ayto’s The Witch’s Children (author Ursula Jones; Orchard), Nicola Bayley’s Katje The Windmill Cat (author Gretchen Woelfle; Walker), Caroline Binch’s Silver Shoes (Dorling Kindersley), Helen Cooper’s Tatty Ratty (Doubleday), Charles Fuge’s Sometimes I Like to Curl Up in a Ball (author Vicki Churchill; Gullane), Bob Graham’s Let’s Get A Pup! (Walker) and Chris Riddell’s Pirate Diary (Walker). ‘This year’s shortlist exemplifies the enormous variety of subjects and styles available,’ commented Usher. The winners will be announced on 12 July.
Branford Boase Award
The winner of the 2002 Branford Boase Award is Sally Prue for Cold Tom (Oxford University Press), her first children’s novel. The editor’s award went to Liz Cross, Head of Fiction at Oxford University Press, who spotted Sally’s talent and oversaw the publication of this first book. The annual Branford Boase Award celebrates the most promising new children’s writer of the previous year, and highlights the importance of the editor in identifying and nurturing new talent. Cold Tom is reviewed on page 23 in BfK’s New Talent slot.
The English 4-11 Awards 2002
The English Association’s The English 4-11 Awards for the Best Children’s Picture Books have been won by:
Key Stage 1:
Fiction: Christine Morton and Eleanor Taylor’s Run, Rabbit, Run (Bloomsbury)
Non-fiction: Ruth Brown’s Ten Seeds (Andersen)
Key Stage 2:
Fiction: Colin Thompson’s Falling Angels (Hutchinson)
Non-fiction: Jacqueline Mitton and Christine Balit’s Kingdom of the Sun: a Book of the Planets (Frances Lincoln)
W H Smith Book Awards
The children’s prize in the W H Smith Book Awards which are voted for by the public has been won by Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl (Puffin).
Books for Children Award
The Books for Children Award for a first book has been won by Czechoslovakian author and illustrator, Petr Horacek for What is Black and White? and Strawberries Are Red (Walker).
REGIONAL
2002 Angus Book Award
Bali Rai’s (Un)Arranged Marriage (Corgi) has won the Angus Book Award. Third-year pupils from eight Angus secondary schools voted for the winner from a shortlist of five titles. The other four shortlisted novels were: Malachy Doyle’s Georgie (Bloomsbury), Carol Hedges’ Jigsaw (OUP), Anthony Horowitz’s Stormbreaker (Walker) and Geraldine McCaughrean’s The Kite Rider (OUP).
CORRECTION
Apologies to Random House Children’s Books for inadvertently crediting another publisher for help with our May cover. It featured Adria Meserve’s Smog the Dog which is, of course, published by Random House.
EVENTS
This Book Belongs to Me
The exhibition, This Book Belongs to Me: A Celebration of Children’s Books from Tom Thumb to Harry Potter, is at the National Library of Scotland, George IV Bridge, Edinburgh from 1 June – 31 October. Among the exhibits is the original Harry Potter manuscript, drawings by such illustrators as Quentin Blake and Mairi Hedderwick, and first editions of some great classics including a 1571 edition of Aesop’s Fables. There are events for children. Further information from 0131 226 4531.
Obituaries
Harry Wingfield
1910–2002
Even if they didn’t know his name, Harry Wingfield is probably the artist whose style is best known to the three decades of children who learnt to read with Ladybird’s ‘Key Words’ series which featured the ever wholesome Peter and Jane. Wingfield based his work on photographs of children playing on the West Midlands council estates near his home. His cosy depiction of family life (gender stereotypes firmly in place) and of the world is now remembered with great affection by many of his readers.
Pierre Marchand
1939–2002
Christine Baker, Editor-in-Chief of Gallimard Jeunesse, writes…
Pierre Marchand, founder and Publisher of Gallimard Jeunesse from 1972-1999 and Director of Creation and Head of Hachette Illustrated until his untimely death, was an electrifying force that could erupt in telluric fury, or radiate warm generosity and mischievous humour, and always blaze a trail of transformation on the page, the book, the concept. Pierre saw himself, and was, a captain with his mates on a ship riding fierce seas. He liked to upset and destroy, in order to build again. He followed his instinct, his intuition, his vision. One step ahead of his teams, of his rivals, of the market – by osmosis he would absorb what he needed from them all. He couldn’t suffer an error of visual taste, or the sin of banality, in a colour, a proportion, a line… his eye was truly laser-sharp. He had to mould, to control: no project was ever less than a challenge, the ambition of the 18th-century Encyclopedists was underlying every idea.
Pierre gave French publishing an international dimension. Everything he created might have been deemed ‘too sophisticated’, ‘ too French’ or the wrong format, but he never had any doubts that his visual language was in fact perfectly international. He couldn’t wait to get to the ABA, even if all we had there in those early days for a booth was a humble small table in a remote corner. Since then all his main creations have been adopted by the greatest American publishers and this gave him some of the rare undiluted reassurance and pride he ever felt.
His pursuit was restless for the book that would show more between its first and its last page than any book had ever shown before… Our design studio, built like a sea liner deck from his own plans, was the hub of his enterprise; to see him charge from table to table amongst designers, editors, illustrators was like observing a pure physic phenomenon of electric conduction.
To live he needed to create and to create, he needed friends and foes, storms and the sea, poetry and sailor songs, red wine, book fairs, the smell of ink and the feel of paper, an endless supply of notebooks, laughter and anger, loyalty and love, and beautiful publishing houses to work in! Faithful to himself to the end, it was with courage, vigour, speed and panache that he said goodbye to all this on 4 April 2002. He had spent up the last of his strength shaping up books, cajoling authors, phoning friends, scheming deals at his desk at Hachette until four weeks before he died: on the eve of what would have been his 33rd Bologna Book Fair and 30 years to the day after he had arrived with a children’s book project contract on the illustrious doorstep of Gallimard.
PEOPLE
Sarah Odedina, Editorial Director of Bloomsbury Children’s Books, has been appointed to the Bloomsbury board.
Puffin has been restructured following Francesca Dow’s appointment as Managing Director. Rebecca McNally, previously Senior Children’s Editor at Macmillan Children’s Books, has been appointed Fiction Publisher and Anna Billson, formerly of Orchard, has been appointed Deputy Art Director. Sarah Hughes, formerly Senior Editor, has been promoted to Editorial Director for Fiction. Publishing Director Penny Morris has left the company.
Ingrid Selberg, formerly of the Pleasant Company and HIT Entertainment, has been appointed Vice-President of UK and international publishing at Gullane Children’s Books.
Ann-Janine Murtagh has been appointed Publishing Director of Orchard Books. She was previously Publishing Director at Kingfisher Books.
HarperCollins Group Rights Director, Katie Fulford, has been appointed interim Managing Director of Collins Children’s Division for a year.
David Smith, former Finance Director at Egmont, has been appointed Managing Director of Two-Can Publishing.
Usborne have appointed Megan Larkin Fiction Editor with a brief to develop a fiction list for younger readers. Ms Larkin was previously at Orchard.
Lindsey Fraser and Kathryn Ross, Executive Director and Deputy Executive Director of Scottish Book Trust, have decided to step down from their posts with Scottish Book Trust later this summer in order to start their own literary consultancy.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor
In his scholarly article about ‘The Arabian Nights’ (BfK, May 2002), Neil Philip twice refers to Shahrazad telling stories to ‘save her life’. This notion, widely held, does little justice to this extraordinary fictional figure.
In ‘The 1001 Nights’ King Shahryar, after his wife’s adultery, begins, madly, to wed virgins, then slaughter them. Shahrazad determines to marry him and by her skills, wean him from his murderous ways. If she simply wished to ‘save her life’, as the Vizier’s daughter, she had only to lie low. Instead she forced her father to take her to the king to save the lives of others.
I base this version not solely on translators like Burton and Mardrus & Mathers, who tend to embroider, but on the 14th-century Muhsin Mahdi text in a scholarly translation by Husain Haddawy (1990). In this, Shahrazad tells her father ‘I would like you to marry me to King Shahryar, so that I may succeed in saving the people or perish and die like the rest.’ And succeed she does by the power of hundreds of stories.
So widespread though, is the ‘saving her life’ notion that when I included the above version in My Sister Shahrazad (Frances Lincoln 2001 – with stunning illustrations by Christina Balit) I was asked more than once – ‘is this authentic or are you making it up?’
It is authentic. Shahrazad is no trembling victim but one of the great heroines of world literature.
Robert Leeson
18 McKenzie Road, Broxbourne, Herts EN10 7JH
Neil Philip writes…
Bob Leeson is quite right that Shahrazad is no trembling victim. Although by the time Shahrazad marries Shahryar, she and her sister are the only marriageable girls left, Shahrazad insists on marrying him, putting her life on the line to ‘save the people’. She is a learned and compassionate heroine, cool-headed and brave; I regret overlooking Leeson’s My Sister Shahrazad, which rightly emphasizes this aspect of the story.
The image of the ‘intelligent, knowledgeable, wise, and refined’ girl whose bravery saves the day is found in other Asian stories. For instance in Asha Dhar’s Folk Tales of Afghanistan (Sterling Publishers, New Delhi, 1982), the enterprising heroine of the story ‘Princess Liyan of Bakhtar’ is praised for her learning, and described as ‘the wisest and most prudent’ of the king’s children, in contrast to her brothers, who are wastrels only interested in sport and hunting.
Dear Editor
Thank you so much for reviewing Sylvia Hall’s No Fear in the May issue of Books for Keeps, and I’m so glad that your reviewer enjoyed the book.
At the end of the review there was some speculation that Sylvia Hall was a pseudonym for an American author.
I’m delighted to say that Sylvia Hall is Sylvia Hall’s real name and she is neither made-up nor American! She hails from Derbyshire, where she lives, writes and teaches drama. No Fear is her third novel with Scholastic; I’m sorry that we didn’t print any biographical details in that book but we’ll remedy this when her next one, Knife Edge (a tense thriller), is published in February 2003.
I hope that clears up any confusion!
Jessica Grant
Publicity Manager, Scholastic Children’s Books