CILIP Kate Greenaway and Carnegie Medal winners 2014

The winners of the CILIP Kate Greenaway and Carnegie Medals were announced yesterday with Jon Klassen winning the illustration award for his picture book, This is Not My Hat, and Kevin Brooks winning the fiction award for his controversial book for older readers, The Bunker Diary.

Canadian Jon Klassen’s second book about hats, This is Not My Hat, uses colours that are usually avoided in picture books. Blacks, dark browns and murky greens dominate the pages and complement the dark humour of the tale. Children will enjoy following the contradictions between the illustrations and the text.

Kevin Brook’s winning book, The Bunker Diary, is a brave choice by the judges and will have caused a bit of controversy. The story, written in diary form, follows a teenage boy who wakes up in an underground chamber with no idea of how he got there. Others, including a young girl and a drug addict, become similarly imprisoned by a captor who never gives a reason for their situation. The story ends without resolution or hope and it is this that has caused the controversy. As readers, we expect a story to end in a way that answers our questions and we expect even the darkest of stories to provide a glimmer of hope, but this doesn’t happen in The Bunker Diary. Kevin Brooks justified this in his speech yesterday by saying that this is what often happens in everyday life and children are aware of this. The book will prove a good text for discussion with students ages 14+ and a useful example of a text that thwarts the traditional storytelling structure.

Helen Thompson, Chair of the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medal judging panel, said:

“Children and teenagers live in the real world; a world where militia can kidnap an entire school full of girls, and where bullying has reached endemic proportions on social media. Exploring difficult issues within the safe confines of a fictional world creates essential thinking space, and encourages young people to consider and discuss their own feelings and reactions.  I believe that the books being published for children and young people are often better researched, better written and more thought provoking than most adult books, and this year’s CILIP Carnegie & Kate Greenaway books are no exception.

“Kevin Brooks has created an entirely credible world with a compelling narrative, believable characters and writing of outstanding literary merit.

“Jon Klassen’s darkly humourous illustrations are a joy to behold. Deceptively simplistic, the expressions and events that he captures, which range from the sublime to the sinister, are utterly wonderful.”

Shadowing Scheme

There is an excellent schools shadowing scheme which runs alongside the awards. Students and teachers read the shortlisted titles together, have Q&A sessions with the authors, hold events, write blogs, reviews, make magazines, and judge their own winners. This year, the titles picked by those shadowing the awards were The Dark by Lemony Snicket and All The Truth That’s In Me by Julie Berry which were actually the same titles picked by the Curriculum Centre staff!

 

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