succinctly, talking about children’s literature as providing both mirrors and windows: mirrors in which children see themselves reflected, especially important in those countries that do not have their own publishing industry; and windows through which children can see how other people live.


Almond has a remarkable capacity to engage and empathise with children and young people, particularly with those under stress. In Kit’s Wilderness (1999), Christopher has to cope with his grandfather’s illness and death, and with the erratic and frightening behaviour of his friend, John Askew, the victim of a broken, drunken father. The children in Heaven Eyes (2000) are on the run from a children’s home. Sometimes, personal tragedy is compounded by catastrophes of deeper cause and wider repercussion. In The Fire Eaters (2003) it is the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Jackdaw Summer (2008), it is terrorist atrocities in the Middle East and genocide in Africa. Almond has the ability to meld the personal with the global, to make distant terror immediate, to draw out the individual responsibility for collective horror, and still, usually, to find hope – and all within a young person’s understanding.


The effect of the work on its readers was equally important to the Hans Andersen judges, and they stressed the way in which ‘Almond captures his young readers’ imagination and motivates them to read, think and be critical’. Almond prompts young people to look at the world in a new way and to discover and trust their own instincts and ways of thinking. While adhering strongly to notions of good and evil, he urges young people to examine the conventional shapes of these notions carefully and to realise how slippery and shifting they can be. His novels frequently feature disorienting experiences: for his characters, like the game of death in Kit’s Wilderness; or, for his readers, like the brilliant opening chapter of the same novel, in which the exultant triumph of friendship and courage over danger is all, and place and time have become irrelevant.


Children discovering who they are


Almond has argued that young people have a semi- independent world, with a timeless primitive quality: a world of ritual, glimpsed in children’s play and games, which is drawn to danger and struggle, concerned with growing through facing trials, engaged with elemental questions, and imbued with imaginative and creative power; power to wound and power to heal. His stories frequently take place in wild places, away from adults, where, for better or worse, children make their own rules and form their own communities. Home, school, and the wider society are as important in these novels as in his readers’ lives. Adults are important sources of love, reassurance, inspiration and advice, as well as anxiety and, sometimes, fear. But, most often, as in Skellig or Clay, adults do not know the whole story and cannot provide solutions. It is young people who


‘


As his work


has developed, Almond seems to have become more aware of what he has to say and keen to take on new challenges. In response to the Hans Andersen Award itself, he says that he is encouraged to be even bolder.


’


make their own choices and discover who they are for themselves.


All of Almond’s work acknowledges the importance of young people’s imagination and creativity. The young people in his books devise games and secret rituals, act out fantasies, paint, draw and sculpt, write stories, and, most recently, in Jackdaw Summer, even create video installations. They engage intensely with the natural and social worlds around them as a way of understanding themselves and absorbing and expressing powerful feelings that threaten to overwhelm them. In The Savage (2008), illustrated by Dave McKean, Blue creates a story that enables him to deal with his anxieties both about a bully that threatens him and the death of his father.


Almond is not sentimental about young people. His books show how young people can as well be turned to cruelty and destruction as to hope and redemption. Stephen in Clay, and Nattrass, in Jackdaw Summer, are young people who find meaning and fulfilment in violence and cruelty. Yet, underlying the darkest moments in Almond’s work, there is a current of wonder in life, in friendship and love, and a tenderness to the young, the vulnerable and the wounded, that constantly holds out hope for his characters and his readers. This found a new expression in My Dad’s A Birdman (2007), an illustrated story for younger children, dedicated in part to Almond’s daughter Freya: a joyous surreal comedy in which the loving and resourceful Lizzie indulges her father’s fantasy of being a bird. This was followed last year by a further collaboration with illustrator Polly Dunbar for younger children in The Boy Who Climbed Into the Moon.


Clive Barnes has retired from Southampton City where he was Principal Children’s Librarian. He is now a freelance researcher and


writer and a member of the British IBBY committee.


David Almond’s books are published by Hodder


Children’s Books and Walker Books.


As his work has developed, Almond seems to have become more aware of what he has to say and keen to take on new challenges. In response to the Hans Andersen Award itself, he says that he is encouraged to be even bolder. Work that is due to be published includes another illustrated book with Dave McKean and a prequel to Skellig: My Name is Mina. This is a journal kept by Mina before she meets Michael, in which she sets out her particular philosophy of life, many elements of which will be immediately recognisable to readers of Almond’s earlier books. It’s a way of looking at the world that is very much the author’s own, and whose singularity and universal appeal has now been properly honoured by the Hans Andersen Award. In the author’s own words: ‘Growing up is a passionate activity that engrosses the body, mind, senses, emotions, spirit. It involves seeing the world as it is, plain and factual, but it also involves exploring the wildness and great mystery at its heart. It involves coming to terms with a world in which reality and myth, truth and lies, turn about each other in a creative dance, as they always have, and always will.’ n


4 Books for Keeps No.184 September 2010


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