Editorial 261
June and July are months of awards and celebrations. Congratulations to Ted Kooser and Connie Wanek, who were awarded the CLiPPA (CLPE Children’s Poetry Award) for their playful, inspiring collection of nature poems, Marshmallow Clouds (Walker Books), and to Nicola Davies who was Highly Commended for Choose Love (Graffeg). This was the 20th anniversary year of the CLiPPA, and CLPE report submissions have been rising over recent years. Children’s poetry is in a healthier state than it was as recently as 2015 when Roger McGough, then a CLiPPA judge, bemoaned the low numbers of submissions. What’s more, anyone lucky enough to attend the CLiPPA award ceremony at the National Theatre, or just two weeks earlier, the Grand Finale of the Poetry By Heart competition at Shakespeare’s Globe would have seen how much children and young people enjoy the opportunity to learn and perform poetry, and how directly it speaks to them.
In the same week as the CLiPPA, Christine Pillainayagam was named winner of the Branford Boase Award for her funny, song-filled, second-generation coming of age story Ellie Pillai is Brown (Faber and Faber). The Branford Boase Award highlights the role of the editor in nurturing new talent so the award is shared with Christine’s editor Leah Thaxton. What the BBA also does is provide a measure for the health of publishing for children and Chair of the judges Julia Eccleshare commented on the exciting freshness to this year’s shortlist of eight books, not just in terms of the diversity of the authors, but in the stories they are choosing to tell.
The Lollies, created by Scholastic in response to the demise of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, are now in their sixth year and the categories have been extended to include to include four new categories: Teens, Poetry Book, Non-fiction and Illustrator of the Year. In the opinion of BfK, funny books and their creators deserve special recognition, so this is very good news.
The UKLA Awards , chosen by teachers, are always worth following and this year went to Katya Balen, winning a second year in succession, to Mariajo Ilustrajo for her debut picturebook, Flooded (Francis Lincoln) and to Jeffrey Boakye for Musical Truth – A Musical History of Modern Black Britain in 28 Songs (Faber and Faber).
As the Great School Library Campaign continues, aiming to ensure that every child has access to a great school library, Michael Rosen visited Parliament to lobby MPs, while the winners of this year’s School Librarians of the Year Awards demonstrate the very real impact access to a well-stocked and carefully curated library has on reading attainment, particularly when it also has staff aware of the importance of reading for pleasure. Congratulations to winners Sally Hamerton from Two Mile Hill Primary School, Bristol and Secondary School Librarian of the Year, Bridget Hamlet from Rushey Mead Academy, Leicester, and to the staff of Colham Manor Primary School, a state-funded primary school in West London, who transformed a neglected storage area into an inviting and engaging library on a very limited budget, winning the Enterprise of the Year Award. Also deserving of praise is Megan Urmston from Abbeyfield School in Chippenham, named Pupil Library Assistant of the Year (PLAA) 2023.
June also sees the announcement of arguably the most prestigious of all UK children’s book awards, the Yoto Carnegies, formerly the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals. This year’s winners were Manon Steffan Ros for The Blue Book of Nebo (Firefly Press) and Jeet Zdung for Saving Sorya: Chang and the Sun Bear (Kingfisher, an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Books). The awards are not without controversy however. The organisers say that the decision to change the names of the medals is to develop ‘The Carnegies’ brand but a petition has been launched to restore the Greenaway name. Only a few days after its publication, the petition has been signed by over 1200 people including Philip Pullman, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Jackie Morris, Dapo Adeola, Rob Biddulph, Lydia Monks, Thomas Taylor and Patrick Ness among others. Read more about this in our September issue.
As the school term comes to a close, we wish all our readers a very happy summer, with lots of reading.
