Irish Book Awards – shortlists on rte.ie

Tomorrow is the official announcement of Irish Book Award shortlists but rte.ie has a jump on everyone else it looks like.

Major congratulations to Celine Kiernan who is shortlisted in The Newcomer of the Year category for The Poison Throne.

The other category shortlists are also now visible on the main  awards site- more on those tomorrow.

Library of 100 talents

As promised last week, here’s some more on Amsterdam’s Library of 100 Talents. Karen Bertrams, a library advisor from Holland, visited Ireland last year as part of a symposium presented by CBI and The Ark. Below is a summary of the project. There is some more information and images available online too – Try here and here

The project started in 2002 when a local school was asked to build a model of a new children’s library to be entered in the national contest ‘The Library of 100 Talents’ and by 2007 had resulted in a brand new library building in Heerhugowaard. This library reflects the way that children now use information, create new contexts and share this with other children. How children find and use information is completely different to adults and therefore a scaled down model of a library for adults would not be successful for children. Instead what was required was a different type of building that made it possible to organise and share information in new ways.

The concept of the Library of 100 Talents finds its roots in the educational visions of Reggio Emilia and the theory of Howard Gardner. The Reggio vision calls it the 100 languages of children. The learning theory of Howard Gardner explains how children look at the world in their own way. He distinguishes nine different forms of intelligence: Verbal, Logical, Visual, Musical, Bodily, Naturalistic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal and Existential.

The Library of 100 Talents offers a framework for developing a truly new library which is conscious of the children’s needs in all its services

Karen Bertrams

Planning and building the Heerhugowaard Library involved consulting with children about the layout, the aesthetics and the programming of this new space. Two hundred and fifty children, 11-12 year olds from 10 different schools, took part in various consultation sessions and master classes. By recording the results carefully in text and illustrations, the architects’ brief for the children’s library gradually developed. This resulted in innovative and child-centred designs including a dome on the roof of the fourth floor where the children can look out over their town, a new way for organising books and materials and purpose built workshop spaces.

Tamar Institute in Palestine wins the ALMA

More international awards for work with children and books and reading…

The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award was announced today in Bologne. The swedes take the legacy of Lindgren very seriously and every year they make an award to an individual, individuals or organisations who are active in reading promotion. And by serious I mean – the prize totals SEK 5 million (equivalent to approx. USD 578,000, 445,000 EUR). Lindgren is an extraordinarily important  figure in  children’s books and the Swedes are determined to celebrate her with this important prize.

As they say

“The prize aims to strengthen and increase interest in children’s and young people’s literature globally. The award is designed to strengthen children’s rights at global level.

This year’s recipient is Tamer Institute for Community Education, Palestine.

Tamer Institute for Community Education
The Tamer Institute for Community Education in Ramallah is an independent organisation that has carried out reading promotion work for children and young people in West Bank and Gaza since 1989. The Tamer Institute was founded to give children access to books and alternative learning as children’s and young people’s schooling, leisure time and lives suffered from the troubles in the area. The Tamer Institute also hands out reading passports. Holders get a stamp for every book they have read. This is a clear symbol of the fact that there are no borders for those who can read books. As Astrid Lindgren said: “Good children’s literature gives the child a place in the world and the world a place in the child”.

The Tamer Institute is the hub of a network that works with writing workshops, storytelling, drama and literary discussion for children and young people. They supply libraries with children’s books and they train librarians and parents. A national reading campaign is organised every year, culminating with National Reading Week. In 2008, the campaign reached 52,000 children in refugee camps and remote villages and communities, who took part in literary discussion, drama and drawing and writing workshops.

The Tamer Institute also carries out youth activities. The young people, who have often participated in Tamer’s work since they were children, publish their own newspaper, Yara´at, among other things. They use it to publish their thoughts, poems and stories. When the Tamer Institute was founded, there were virtually no Palestinian children’s books. The organisation has now published more than 130 titles and several of the children who attended the Tamer Institute’s writing workshops have started to write their own books as adults.

Despite difficult circumstances, the Tamer Institute works tirelessly on many levels to create a better situation for Palestinian children and young people via literature. Their conviction that words can tear down walls has resulted in innovative reading promotion activities of an unusual breadth, for which reason the Tamer Institute has been awarded the 2009 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

http://www.tamerinst.org

Bravo Poetry Aloud (and famous Seamus of course)

Seamus Heaney has been awarded the ninth David Cohen Prize for Literature. A popular winner Seamus accepted the award with his usual wit and warmth.

A great part of the prize? – he gets to select a recipient for the £12,500 Clarissa Luard Award and he choose Poetry Aloud organised by The National Library of Ireland and Poetry Ireland. Congrats to one and all.

Photo below via Book Brunch featuring Seamus and Maire Heaney along with Aongus O hAonghusa of the National Library and Jane O’Hanlon of Poetry Ireland. In accepting the award Jane said it was

“A heartening expression of support which acknowledged the organisations’ commitment to high-quality literary arts practice with young people.”

Libraries with Teeth

David coined that great phase recently when a passionate librarian responded to a Kevin Myers article which questioned the need for publicly funded arts and library spaces.

The library employees will stay on the state payroll while the bookshop closes and its owners and their employees go on the dole. Precisely what are the benefits of that for any town, or any minister for finance?

Moreover, what is the actual cost of keeping both theatre and library going, in terms of maintenance, heating, depreciation, plus the salaries and lifetime pensions of the public servants who work in them?

Discussion of libraries and their role continued in the Irish Times with a piece about their increased use in times of recession. Based on Library Council input the article outlines how

More people are coming in to use computer facilities – some 97 per cent of the State’s libraries offer free internet access – to look for and apply for jobs. “People are also joining simply because they now have less money and more time on their hands,” he (Brendan Teeling, The Library Council) believes.

The books being borrowed have shifted, again with the budget books now competing with self-help books for readers’ attention, although both are overshadowed by the demand for the popular fiction of Marian Keyes, Cecelia Ahern and Maeve Binchy, who all routinely feature in the top 10 most borrowed books in Ireland’s libraries.

Libraries are an extraordinary community resource and in so many cases, with the comittment of staff, community and other organisations become vibrant hubs for literature. Sometime I wonder though if they try and be too many things to too many people. Nurturing the creative flair of some library spaces may just allow them to excel in a particular area – children’s services, local history, music etc. I’ve been lucky enough to meet with some library teams from Holland who push to develop the range and ambition of library services. More on the inspiring Library of 100 Talents tomorrow ……

Bisto Book of the Year Shortlist Announced

The ten titles on the shortlist have just been announced -

Full details here and both Celine and David are already talking about it,

Here’s hoping the media agree that discussing the shortlisted titles is worthy of some space. There is plenty of time between now and the May 20th announcement for some vigorous debate

Quick Update – Coverage today (March 12th) in Irish Independent, Irish Examiner, Irish Daily Mail and Metro

Monstrous Marketing Machines begin march for Colfer and Adams

The marketing machine for Eoin Colfer’s sequel to the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is swinging into action. Cover has been released and Penguin and Pan Macmillan are vowing to work together to promote both Colfer’s new title and the backlist.

Here’s what Eoin had to say at the launch-

All this hitching and adventuring went on for five books and then Douglas Adams passed away before he could write book six. Hitchhiker has been heard on radio, seen on tv and enjoyed on the cinema screen, there was even a musical version. But the story could never end, until now. I am going to continue on where Douglas left off. Unfortunately for me, he left off on rather a large cliffhanger. Everyone was dead. Which means I have rather a large challenge ahead of me, but it is one I am looking forward to.

The book will be out later this year. It will be called And Another Thing. And I really hope you will board the spaceship with me so we can travel through Douglas Adams’ hilarious galaxy together, which will save me having to hang around in your driveway.

And here’s some eye popping sales stats from the Bookseller -

Global sales for the Hitchhiker books are 16 million, with Eoin Colfer’s global sales standing at 18 million.

What I learned from World Book Day…..

1. One small child can consume five buns without pausing for oxygen

2 Don Conroy still makes me very happy

3 There will be a musical adaptation of Under the Hawthorn Tree opening in Canada next week

4 Double decker busses find it difficult to turn on North Great George’s Street

5 Having a tea party for 30 kids and 7 authors in CBI makes for a lively morning

Who was the most borrowed authors in Irish Libraries in January 2009?

A consequence of the launch of Public Lending Renumeration this week is the start of a flow of information about what books are being borrowed by irish readers. Details have been available from UK Libraries for some years but with the arrival of PLR.ie we get some access to Irish Library statistics.

So who was most borrowed author? – Binchy? Barry? Keyes? JK Rowling?

Nope it was Francesca Simon and author Tony Ross for their Horrid Henry creations- it certainly surprised me!

Most borrowed book was not so creative  – The Official Driver Theory Test

Interesting chat about other implications of PLR over on David’s blog