Children’s laureate here and there

The position of children’s laureate is a high profile one in Britain. Especially as the current holder Micheal Rosen seems to have the gift of bilocation and appears in every single children’s books related media piece or event. What is shows is that with a media friendly hook like the laureate you can generate increased profile and public awareness.

An Irish children’s laureate has been proprosed at a number of events recently including some arts council consultation meetings and yesterday’s CBI Cle forum (David has some good notes on this, there will be a record of it online on CBI’s site in coming weeks).

A key figure with a strong profile might be just what the Irish children’s books scene needs. Who that writer/illustrator might be is a whole other question!

Meanwhile the process of choosing Michael’s sucessor in the UK is underway.

Where exactly are those wild things?

The movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are seemed to have fallen out focus of late. I was really looking forward to seeing and certainly some early shots allegedly leaked from the set looked promising. The movie was originally due for release this year but now it seems it will be at least October 09 before it comes out.

There’s a long but fascinating interview with Spike Jonze about the process over on aintitcool.com

Spike Jonze: Yeah, it’s so long and it’s so complicated. When I was writing it, I kind of knew it was complicated, but I kind of just had to be willfully naïve about that to not get bogged down in it. But it’s hard. I think by the time we got to Australia and were shooting it, the realities of what we were trying to do set in. And it was just sort of exhausting and insane to be out on these cliffs in southern Australia where there’s 60 mph winds, and you’ve got all these guys in suits, and you’ve got this little boy who’s freezing. We had to abandon locations because of storms, and when the winds would get too high we’d have to evacuate and try to figure out what to do with the rest of the day while waiting for the storms to pass. So it was just total insanity.

Barack Obama, Philip Pullman and Alan Gibbons

Many of you might have spotted an article in Guardian/Observer featuring Philip Pullman’s appeal to a comprehensive in Chesterfield to keep its library open. Meadows Community School is ditching their library (and librarian) in favour of a ‘virtual learning environment’ and a reading room (without librarian).

Author Alan Gibbons has been motivating a campaign about similar issues – you can follow progress over on his blog. He’s even managed to weave in Obamania with these quotes

Guardians of truth and knowledge, librarians must be thanked for their role as champions of privacy, literacy, independent thinking, and most of all reading.

The critical importance of language, of writing, of reading, of communication, of books as a means of transmitting culture and binding us together as a people.

The library represents a window to a larger world, the place where we’ve always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts.

In an Irish context the evidence overwhelmingly points to the success of school libraries. The snappily titled Junior Certificate Support Programme Demonstration Library Project continues to show what can be achieved when a properly resourced and dedicated space is contributed to the school environment. The Room for Reading Report on the project is long but a terrific source of evidence of the importance of school libraries in Ireland. As one young reader said

It’s brilliant, you can learn more and learn about things you know nothing about and it helps with project work. It’s easier to learn and its very relaxing.”

Sally Nicholls interview in today’s Irish Times

“When you’re 10, you think: ‘I’m going to be an astronaut when I grow up.’ And when you get to 25, you realise that actually to be an astronaut isn’t open to you any more. I just feel so grateful that when I was 10 I wanted to be writer. That was my ‘being an astronaut’, and I get to do it, and I get to do it all day, and I get to write stories, and people like them, and I just find that really, really amazing,” she says.

Fiona Mc Cann, interviews Sally Nicholls, fresh from her triumph at the Glen Dimplex awards in today’s Irish Times.

Roald Dahl Funny Prize – Winners Announced

The winners were announced at an awards ceremony at the Unicorn Theatre in London on 13 November. The prize is presented by BookTrust  in association with Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen. The panel of five judges was chaired by Michael Rosen; the other judges were Sophie Dahl, Dara O’Briain, Chris Riddell and Kaye Umansky.

More over on Booktrust

The winner of the Funniest Book for Children Aged Six and Under was The Witch’s Children Go to School by Ursula Jones, illus. Russell Ayto (Orchard Books)

The winner of the Funniest Book for Children Aged Seven to Fourteen was Mr Gum and the Dancing Bear by Andy Stanton, illus. David Tazzyman (Egmont Press)

Michael Rosen, Chair of judges, said:

‘The Witch’s Children Go To School is a rumbustious tale in the tradition of mischievous spirits causing mayhem and disorder where it’s least wanted. Every page shouts with the sound of chaos and surprise: we are told that a school is turned into a storybook, the class teacher into the Mad Hatter and the school inspector is turned into a big smelly cheese. And that’s not even half of it. This is a book that can be enjoyed many times, the corners of pages are as important as the middles, each spread invites the eye to busy itself all over the page hunting for new gags, while new impossibilities of anatomy, architecture and physics appear at every turn. The book is a delight.

‘Andy Stanton has developed a comic style all of his own, full of ludicrous similes, uproarious bathos, absurdity and grossness. Mr Gum and the Dancing Bear fulfils the requirement that a truly funny novel should have at least a laugh a page and a gasp-making denouement. At the heart of the book is a a thought about how we treat animals, but don’t let that confuse you. In fact, confusion is the outright winner here – as Jonathan Ripples says, ‘pointing to an orange blob on his map, ‘I thought this was England, but it turned out to be a bit of chicken tikka I spilt last night.’

Walker Books on walkabout in Dublin

Sarah Webb just alerted me to a new partnership between Walker Books and NCAD – looks like an interesting project. Macmillan have been doing something similar with the Macmillan prize for students but I think this might be the first time that a publisher either from Ireland or abroad has targetted a specific group of Irish students – Do you think they would let me enrol just for this week so I could hang out with Bruce Ingman?

The NCAD (National College of Art and Design), Ireland’s most prestigious art college, will play host to leading Walker Books illustrator Bruce Ingman this month. The award-winning illustrator is best known for his modern classics with author Allan Ahlberg, The Runaway Dinner, Previously and The Pencil, which was published this Autumn.
From the 17th to the 21st November, Bruce will be conducting a week long project with the 3rd year Visual Communication students in NCAD. He will be joined on 21st November by Walker Books’ Picture Book publisher Deirdre McDermott, herself a former student of the Visual Communication course at the college. Together they will offer one lucky student the opportunity of an internship at Walker next summer 2009. Along with Brendon Deacy, senior tutor at NCAD, Bruce and Deirdre will be looking for the most promising new book-making talent, be it in illustration, graphics or typography.

Children’s writer Sally Nichols, scoops the Glen Dimplex Prize

Sally Nichols,   Ways to Live Forever   (Scholastic Children’s Books) last night won the Children’s category and the overall prize in the Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards.

Ways to Live Forever, first published in January 2008 to award-winning acclaim, is the stunning debut novel from Sally Nicholls, who wrote the story when she was twenty-three years old. The honest, moving tale of an eleven year-old boy dying of leukaemia, Ways to Live Forever is published in September 2008 in a new commercial paperback edition, which will enable this extraordinary book to reach a different, wider audience

It’s great to see a children’s title take the overall prize though it struck me as a very odd shortlist indeed!

More about the awards over on newwritersawards.ie

All Ireland Symposium – ISSCL

The Irish Society for The Study of Children’s Literature are hosting a special symposium in November.

CONNECTIONS:  Children’s Literature and Culture
1st All-Ireland Symposium of The Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature (ISSCL)
Hosted by the School of Languages, Literatures and Performing Arts in Association with the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast
November 22, Seminar Room, Postgraduate Centre, 18 College Green

Speakers include

A  Keynote Lecture and Discussion by Prof. Dr. Emer O’Sullivan (Leuphana University, Lüneburg): about the representation of foreign nations in ABCs and picturebooks.

Brief presentations of current projects / research activities:
•    Dr Áine McGillicuddy (Dublin City University): “Images of Germany and Alsace in the work of children’s author and illustrator Hansi”
•    Prof. Máire Messenger Davies (University of Ulster): “Screen Adaptation: authenticity and audience”
•    Alexandra Cochrane (University of Ulster): “Storytelling on children’s television”
Beth Rodgers (PhD candidate, Queen’s University): “’On the Borderland’: Adolescent girlhood in the fin-de-siècle literary marketplace”
•    Jane Carroll (PhD candidate, Trinity College Dublin): “The landscape in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence”
•    Jessica d’Eath (PhD candidate, NUI Galway): “The portrayal of World War One in Italian Children’s Literature over time”
•    Nora Maguire (PhD candidate, Trinity College Dublin): “Childness: Childhood tropes in contemporary German literature”
•    Anne-Marie Herron (PhD candidate, St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra): t.b.a.
•    Kate Harvey (PhD candidate, Trinity College Dublin): “Children’s Shakespeares: text and production”
•    Carrie Anderson (des. PhD candidate): “Mrs Sherwood and the popularisation of didactic literature”
•    Aoife Murray (des. PhD candidate): “Author and authority in children’s literature”

And a round table concluding debate – Developments in Children’s Literature Studies in Ireland with Dr Mary Shine Thompson, Dr Amanda Piesse, Ciara Ni Bhroin, Valerie Coghlan, Celia Keenan, Dr Pádraic Whyte and Martina Seifert.

The event ends with author  Colin Bateman reading  from his children’s books

age banding has not gone away

The age banding debate keeps rumbling on. Recently  both

the Irish Writers Union

and the

Library Association of Ireland

have weighed into this debate

The no to age banding main site is also expanding. Have spotted some new titles with age bands marked on them but they have been few and far between

is it too early to mention Xxxx?

I’ve been enjoying recent visits to Pj Lynch’s blog so its an opportune time to remind you about special PJ event in December.

Monday December 8th 2008 – 6.30pm
National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin 2

“PJ Lynch… the Champion of Picture Book Illustration in Ireland”

CBI invites you to a special Christmas celebration in honour of Ireland’s foremost picture-book artist, PJ Lynch. PJ will be joined by Dr Pat Donlon to discuss his life and work to date, including such wonderful seasonal titles as The Christmas Miracle of Jonathon Toomey, A Christmas Carol and The Gift of The Magi, published  this year.
Those attending will also have the opportunity to enjoy an exhibition of selected pieces from the National Library’s PJ Lynch collection, which will be on public display for the first time to mark the occasion and PJ will be happy to sign books as well.

Please Note: Entry to this event is free but numbers are limited. To book please email:
info@childrensbooksireland.ie, including your name, telephone number and the number of places you require for event.