Rewarding Reads: Jake Hope celebrates the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals


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ook awards for children act as a barometer for the shifting traditions, values and ideas that we as individuals and as a society invest in the early stages of our development. The


Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professional’s Carnegie and Kate Greenaway medals are the longest running awards in the United Kingdom and among the most prestigious. Celebrating their 80th and 60th anniversaries respectively, the prizes recognise a rich reader experience built from the words or pictures of a work published for children. The wide-ranging base of subjects, genres, themes and styles among its past winners provides material for exploring perspectives on childhood and the formative role that stories and books have in forging our identity and, by extension, of shaping society.


Setting the Standard


Arthur Ransome was the inaugural winner of the Carnegie Medal (1936), awarded to a work of outstanding literature for children. Pigeon Post is a real romp of a children’s adventure novel with a summer holiday search for treasure among a close-knit group of friends. Underlying the plot are ideas around communication and independence and playful consideration of the different worlds that children and adults sometimes inhabit. This innocent childhood world is replicated to some extent in Edward Ardizonne’s Tim All Alone, the inaugural winner of the Kate Greenaway Award for distinguished illustration. The eponymous Tim returns home to find his parents have disappeared, and so sets out on a nautical adventure to find them, his adventure vividly depicted through the draughtsmanship of Ardizonne’s pen and ink sketches and water colour spreads.


Innocence Lost


Both books explore a construction of childhood where play and exploration form crucial parts of character experiences and ones where those themes embrace readers through vicarious involvement. Not all winners have shown childhood through such rosy eyes, however.


Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows was his second win


(1981), after The Machine Gunners (1975). His work disrupted the notion of childhood as a time of innocence and uncovered a much darker side to play and preoccupation. The Scarecrows itself is a stark account of frustrated needs, desires and the awakening of sexual desire. More recently Kevin Brooks’ The Bunker Diary (2014), looked at ideas of control and powerlessness and caused debate around just what constitutes a children’s book and whether hope is a key element in this.


Judging Juries


It is the professional expertise of librarians that forms the base of decisions made by the panel of judges. Each judge is a librarian representing each regional branch of the Youth Libraries Group. It is their critical discernment, based around the breadth of their reading and encompassing knowledge of trends in publishing and prevalent attitudes surrounding childhood, that has fuelled their decisions over the decades. The awards have sometimes been criticised for not involving the target audience of children in the actual judging itself.


Casting Long Shadows


Although not involved in judging, children and young people across the United Kingdom and further afield do take part in shadowing. Established in the early 1990s the Shadowing Scheme sees groups involved in reading and appraising the shortlists of the medals. More groups currently shadow the Carnegie Medal than the Kate


12 Books for Keeps No.224 May 2017


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