Carnegie and Greenaway Awards: Wrap Up
And the winner of the Kate Greenaway Award is…
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Jim Kay (illustrations)
And the winner of the Carnegie Award is…
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Jim Kay (illustrations)
Patrick Ness has done it again. He also won the Carnegie Award last year with the final instalment of his Chaos Walking Series ‘Monsters of Men’. This is also the first book to win both the Carnegie and Greenaway Awards, though it is Jim Kay who wins the Greenaway for his illustrations.
This wasn’t my favourite in either category but it is an exceptional book and is therefore a worthy winner. I do have quite a few very happy students, which is unusual when it comes to winner’s announcement time!
This year was very unusual in that very few students liked one book much more than the others. They all found picking a favourite really difficult and said that they would be quite happy for 3 or 4 of the books to win. We also had more students finishing the whole list than ever before, a fantastic achievement given that there were 8 books on each list this year. There’s been lots of lively discussion and two friends very nearly fell out in a disagreement over ‘The Midnight Zoo’. As always, Carnegie has brought readers together and encouraged them to read and discuss books they normally wouldn’t have touched. This for me is the magic of the Award.
My Winners would have been ‘Between Shades of Grey’ by Ruta Sepetys and ‘There Are No Cats in This Book’ by Viviane Schwarz. This year, like the students I was actually happy for any number of them to win. That’s not because the standard was low, far from it. This year the books were more readable and probably aimed at slightly younger children, something I don’t believe is any bad thing. In past years students (and me!) have struggled to read most of the books but that wasn’t an issue this year which is a welcome change.
So now Carnegie is over it’s time for me to start looking at what I want to nominate for the local book award the Brilliant Book Award…
Post by Alison