Children’s writing has been having a bit of a moment over the past couple of weeks, after a conversation on social media between children’s authors gathered into a sort of cri de coeur about the public neglect of their craft. Children’s books, they said, are barely covered in newspaper review pages or on the radio these days. Prizes for their creators have dwindled in number – the Smarties and Guardian prizes have long gone by the board, and the children’s category at the Costa book awards went down with that ship. We all know about the dwindling stock of public libraries. The writers complained, too, that publishers are using celebrity name recognition for the path of least resistance: diverting their marketing budgets into ghostwritten pap by TV stars.
That, they rightly said, is a sad thing. Their complaints made some headlines, bounced the odd newspaper books page into promising greater coverage and even earned airtime on the Today programme. Good.
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