BfK News: May 2006
INTERNATIONAL AWARDS
The Hans Christian Andersen Awards 2006
The Hans Christian Andersen Jury of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) has announced that Margaret Mahy (New Zealand) is the winner of the 2006 Hans Christian Andersen Author Award and Wolf Erlbruch (Germany) is the winner of the 2006 Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration. Margaret Mahy has won the Carnegie Medal twice.
The 2006 IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award
The IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award, initiated by the International Board on Books for Young People and sponsored by the Japanese newspaper company the Asahi Shimbun, is presented to projects run by groups or institutions that are judged to be making a lasting contribution to reading promotion for children and young people. The IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award for 2006 goes to The Mongolian Children’s Mobile Library Project and The Foundation ABCXXI-Emotional Health Program: All of Poland Reads to Kids.
Established in 2002, The Mongolian Children’s Mobile Library Project focuses on the promotion of book reading among children in rural areas throughout Mongolia, and is specifically aimed at the young people of the nomadic groups of herders who live in the remote areas of Mongolia. The mobile libraries are transported not only by bus across the vast steppes, but also by camel.
The All of Poland Reads to Kids campaign began in 2001 and aims to revitalise the custom of reading to children at home, in kindergartens and at school, thus encouraging the healthy emotional development of children. The direct target groups are parents, teachers, caregivers and other people working with children, as well as the media.
NATIONAL AWARDS
The 2006 CILIP / LiS Libraries Change Lives Award
Books on the Edge, a project working with vulnerable young people and drug addicts in Blackburn, helping to create a senses of ownership of the library; Multicultural Development Service, a library service focused on guest workers and their families in Lincolnshire; and Sighthill Library Youth Work, an innovative library-based scheme working with excluded young people to address antisocial behaviour in the Sighthill area of Edinburgh, are in the running for the 2006 CILIP/LiS Libraries Change Lives Award. The winner of the award will be announced on 26 April 2006 at the Library + information Show (LiS), The Pavilion, NEC, Birmingham. This year’s judges are: Nigel Thomas (Chair) from Leicestershire Libraries, Terry Turner, Chief Executive of Eastern England Museums, Carole Wolstenholme from Lancashire Libraries and Nigel Clear, Event Director for LiS. The award is sponsored by the Library + information Show. The event is organised and administered by CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and its Community Service Group.
English 4-11 Picturebook Awards
English 4-11 is the Primary School journal of The English Association. The winners for books published in 2005 are:
Non-fiction
Ice Bear by Nicola Davies, ill. Gary Blythe, (Walker Books)
The Art Book for Children by Amanda Renshaw and Gilda Williams Ruggi (Phaidon Press)
Fiction
Wolves by Emily Gravett (Macmillan)
The Princess and the Pea by Lauren Child (Puffin)
REGIONAL AWARD
Berkshire Children’s Book Award 2005
The winner of the 2005 Berkshire Book Award is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J K Rowling (Bloomsbury).This Award enables young people from 11-14 from 50 schools across the county to both nominate the titles and select the winner. Anthony Horowitz’s Ark Angel (Walker) took second place and Eldest by Christopher Paolini (Doubleday) came third.
EVENTS
Diversity Matters: Changing Cultural Perspectives in Children’s Publishing
24-25 June 2006 at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Westminster.
Organised by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) on behalf of Arts Council England, this conference follows the research report, ‘In Full Colour’ by Arts Council England and the Bookseller into the barriers to cultural diversity in the publishing industry. Keynote speakers will include Malorie Blackman. The primary audience for the conference will be publishers, writers and illustrators, alongside booksellers, librarians and teachers. It will also incorporate a public showcase event for local families with performances and workshops. Subsidised price – £75 for two days’ attendance. Further information from Rick Behari, Press Officer, Arts Council England (020 7973 6890 or rick.behari@artscouncil.org.uk) or Julia Eccleshare, CLPE (020 7401 3382/3 or julia@clpe.co.uk).
Through the Looking Glass at Glasgow Science Centre
An exhibition that explores the science behind Alice’s magical world in a way which will intrigue adults and children alike. What does falling down the rabbit hole teach us about perception over reality? How does the mysterious hall of doors teach us about optical illusions? In what way does the Queen’s Croquet Ground offer geometry lessons with a difference? How does your brain work to make sense of the information gathered by your senses? Runs until the Autumn. Further information: Glasgow Science Centre on 0141 420 5000. Entrance to the exhibition is included in the price of a Science Mall ticket, £6.95 for adults, £4.95 for children.
Obituary
Eric Baker
1913-2005
Quentin Blake writes…
The readers of this magazine appreciate the value of interested, knowledgeable and passionate booksellers, and so will have no difficulty in identifying with a salute to the life and achievement of Eric Baker, who died on 18 November last year, just before his 92nd birthday. After an apprenticeship in printing and war service, he went into educational publishing and was the Baker in the newly-founded Mary Glasgow and Baker; however, it was when he left that firm that he achieved his dream of a bookshop devoted entirely to children’s books. The Children’s Book Centre, just off Kensington High Street, was for twenty years a flagship and inspiration to booksellers, parents, teachers and librarians.
Eric Baker was not the sort of person to take easily to retirement, and after selling The Children’s Book Centre in 1979 he established Baker Book Services, supplying children’s books by mail order. But it’s the achievement of The Children’s Book Centre and its inspirational founder that earns him a place in the story of children’s books in this country.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor
I am sure Professor Hunt cannot truly be trying to suggest that either Stephanie Nettell or I think children are unperceptive and cannot pick up sub-texts (BfK No 157). (I am confident my entire body of work speaks otherwise and I know it is not any belief of Stephanie’s.)
We simply recognise a distinction he continues to fail to make between reading a text differently when approaching it from, say, a feminist, Marxist, or Christian viewpoint, and what we might term, in shorthand, Orkney Satanic Ritual spotting. In the former, you are dealing with the actual words on the page; in the latter, with the mind of a reader hair-triggered to see what isn’t there – a very different matter.
And the reason 90% of the publicity material is about the authors, rather than the books themselves, is simply a desperate attempt by publishers to foster an interest in their wares in a culture of celebrity. In a real reading culture, none but a biographer would bother with it for a moment.
Anne Fine
annefine@comtek.uk.net
This correspondence is now closed. Ed.
Attitudes towards Christianity
Dear Editor
Having recently received your March issue (BfK No. 157), I wish to express some concern over the tone of some of your reviews, specifically those of The Garden by Elsie V. Aidinoff and Into the Wardrobe: C.S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles by David C. Downing. I haven’t read either text, so I don’t wish to comment on them particularly, but I feel that both reviewers (DS and PH) were writing with an assumption that readers would share their scorn at the notion of any kind of Christian belief. I am a Church in Wales Anglican, so not someone who might easily be dismissed as a ‘bible-bashing evangelical fundamentalist’, but I do find the arrogance of these views, so prevalent now in the media generally, rather saddening. All too often, those who make these kinds of implications like to think of themselves as liberal, when their eagerness to dismiss that about which they are ill-informed makes them as narrow-minded as any ‘foot-washing baptist’. In a magazine about books for children and young people, all views should be treated with equal respect, a word often bandied about and something that we hope to instil in the next generation. Please compare these reviews with the respectful tone of KA’s for Muslims in Britain on p.23 and avoid ‘negative stereotyping’ of Christians, too.
Rhian E. Churchill
STAFFREC@yggwyr.swansea.sch.uk
Peter Hollindale writes…
It may surprise Rhian Churchill to know that I also am a Church in Wales Anglican, and the idea that I am scornful of Christianity would astonish my fellow-parishioners in Anglesey. However, I do regard evolution as fact, not theory, and Genesis as a myth. So do most Christians I know. American evangelical fundamentalism seems to me intellectually untenable and politically dangerous, and in my review of The Garden I wished to salute the courage and skill of an elderly but new American writer in challenging it.
David Self writes…
Rhian E Churchill writes as an Anglican and takes me to task about my review of C.S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles by David C. Downing, damning my ‘scorn at the notion of any kind of Christian belief’. To declare my faith, not that it is relevant to my review, I happen to be a communicant Anglican, a regular contributor to Church Times and the author of a score of books about the Christian faith. But, to make explicit my criticism of the book, I felt it necessary to point out that it is a narrowly Christian commentary on the saga and that it might disappoint many of the film’s fans who do not share my (or your correspondent’s) faith.
COMPETITION
Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2006
The Poetry Society and The Foyle Foundation announce the launch of the ninth Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2006. This prestigious prize is open to anyone between the ages of 11 and 17 and consistently recognises and rewards some of the brightest future stars of the poetry world.
Prizes include – for the top end of the age-range 15-17 year-olds – the chance to attend a week-long residential course at the prestigious Arvon Centre in Lumb Bank where they will be tutored by the judges of the competition. The winners in the 11-15 range receive a visit to their school from one of the Poetry Society’s excellent team of Poets in Schools. The prize attracts entries from all over the world, including Asia and the US, and a special commendation will be given to the top entries from outside the UK.
All winners will be invited to attend a major awards ceremony in London on National Poetry Day (Thursday 5 October). The winning poems will be published in a specially printed anthology.
For a copy of the entry form, write to Education, Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX, email fyp@poetrysociety.org.uk, or visit www.foyleyoungpoets.org
To receive a free copy of the 2005 winners anthology, When the Thunder Woke Me, send an A5 self-addressed envelope to Education, Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX or email fyp@poetrysociety.org.uk