The Carnegies are a long-running award for children’s writing and illustration, established by the Library Association in honour of Scottish philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and first awarded in 1936 to Arthur Ransome’s Pigeon Post. This year’s shortlist of 16 for fiction and illustration, chosen by a dozen librarians, is out now and billed thus: ‘Marginalised Male Perspectives Explored with Empathy and Hope’. So, boys are the new girls as the left-behinds of our day and white boys in particular are the group most obviously marginalised.
Well, boys certainly feature in some of the work, but what’s striking about the shortlist is what it represents about contemporary children’s books: an awful lot is depressing or depressed, to do with alienation, marginalisation, problems and conditions. Rather little of it is really about what is, I’d say, the essence of writing for children, namely, storytelling.
The books are a whole world away from the genre represented by previous Carnegie winners: Eve Garnett (The Family from One End Street), Noel Streatfeild (The Circus is Coming), BB (The Little Grey Men), Elizabeth Goudge (The Little White Horse), Lucy Boston (A Stranger at Green Knowe). Up to about the mid-1980s, the Carnegies represented some of the best children’s writing around – and there was a lot of it.
This year’s shortlist, by contrast, goes some way to explaining why the number of children reading for pleasure is now down to one in three. The latest figures show it has dropped 8 per cent in a year. Presented with this selection – depressing social realism with a didactic emphasis on diversity and inclusion – I’m not sure I’d be kicking down the library doors either. And the grim thing is that the librarians who choose what gets rewarded end up selecting what gets chosen for school libraries. I’m not sure reading for pleasure comes into it; story doesn’t seem the primary concern.
The first of the illustrated books I picked up from this year’s list was Home Body by Theo Parish, which is a graphic picture account of the journey of a trans-nonbinary young person – ‘to explore who I am’. A pivotal moment is the Norwich Pride Celebration at which he asks his friend to paint his face with his chosen identity colours and he’ll paint hers: his/theirs is non-binary; hers is pansexual. I mean, in Norwich? There’s lots of hugs and ‘thank you for sharing this with us’.
Then there’s Wolf and Bear by Kate Rolfe, about, er, the friendship between a wolf and a bear, but it turns out it’s really about depression, because Bear wants to stay in the shadows, which presumably comes into the category the press release describes as ‘empowering young people by exploring complex emotions’.
The Invisible Story, illustrated by Wen Hsu Chen, is rather a charming account of an invisible book that can only be read by a blind child, and it turns out it’s written in Braille. That’s the disability category ticked, but in a good way. Letters in Charcoal by Irene Vasco, illustrated by Juan Palomino, is not only about promoting literacy in Colombia, but comes with a final note about colonialism.
An awful lot is depressing or depressed, to do with alienation, marginalisation, problems and conditions
Lauren Child is associated with fun stuff – her Charlie and Lola series – but Grey, her collaboration with Laura Dockrill, is a book about depression, and gives each mood a colour. The Chinese offering, Flying High by Cao Wenxuan, is also about a boy having a tough time, being short, but the illustrations by Yu Rong are so charming it’s uplifting, like the kites in the story.
In the fiction category there’s more social realism in verse. The Final Year by Matt Goodfellow, illustrated by Joe Todd-Stanton, is an empathetic account of a boy from a single-parent family (one mother, one aunt) in his last year of primary school in the north of England.
As for Margaret McDonald’s Glasgow Boys, it’s about ‘18-year-old Finlay who has begun his nursing degree… but coming straight from the care system means he has no support network. How can he write essays… and stop himself from falling for the most beautiful boy at university when he’s struggling to feed himself?’ Margaret has ‘expertly weaved her working-class Scottish background, her Crohn’s disease diagnosis, her pain medication dependency, her experience working for the NHS, her partner’s work with social services… and much more’. It’s empathetic, certainly, but depressing. And if I were in the situation that the characters are, I’d want out of it, with a story that takes me elsewhere.
The rotten cream of the crop is Kelly McCaughrain’s Little Bang, about how a girl in Northern Ireland has an abortion, but gets into the habit of calling the foetus Little Bang, even after it’s aborted. Wouldn’t you just love to hear the story from Little Bang’s perspective?
I’m not sure this shortlist will turn the young, who are increasingly disenchanted with books, into readers. Few would draw me in. And if you compare it with the early winners of the Carnegie Medal, and consider the ones from the first 50 years that didn’t win, it’s actually depressing. My advice if you’re getting books for children is to look up the early winners of the prize and offer those instead.
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