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Children's
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Written by Nicolette Jones
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Friday, 23 January 2009 08:11 |
Anthony Horowitz’s eloquent speech at this week’s Marsh Award for Children’s Books in Translation (see BookBrunch story) raised – not for the first time in the history of the award – important points about our cultural small-mindedness. While as many as 40 per cent of the books published in other European countries are books in translation, some 3 per cent of ours are. And the books shortlisted for the Marsh awards were a fine sampler of works with big themes that ask to be read globally. Not least among them was Valérie Zenatti’s Message in a Bottle (Bloomsbury), translated by Adriana Hunter, about the conflict between Israel and Gaza, from which Horowitz read an extract so timely it might have described an incident in this week’s news. The stumbling block for our publishing sans frontières, Horowitz rightly pointed out, was our attitude of mind.
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Children's
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Written by Nicolette Jones
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Friday, 16 January 2009 10:57 |
The arrival of new editions of Puffin Post on subscribers’ doorsteps last weekend prompts me, as one of the 16,000 founder members of the Puffin Club in 1967, to go back and look through my original copies.
In them I find yoga tips from Yehudi Menuhin, the Club’s second president (after Penguin founder Sir Allen Lane), photographs and articles by Quentin Blake (gurning playfully), Leon Garfield (so like Harold Steptoe), Roald Dahl (young and dashing), Nina Bawden (a beauty), Joan Aiken, Philippa Pearce, Ursula Moray Williams, Michael Bond . . . There are illustrations by Ronald Searle (Puffin editorial director Kaye Webb’s husband) and Shirley Hughes, and, notably, Jill McDonald, who gave the magazine its distinctive look. And celebrities other than writers attended Puffin events – proper celebrities, who were famous for doing things: Jenny Agutter, Thor Heyerdahl, Pelé.
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Children's
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Written by Nicolette Jones
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Friday, 09 January 2009 11:29 |
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Michelle Magorian’s triumph as the Costa Children’s Book of the Year winner with Just Henry makes it a prize double for Egmont, which also carried off the older category of the first Roald Dahl Funny Prize, with Andy Stanton and David Tazzyman’s Mr Gum and the Dancing Bear. This is fine recognition for the publisher. But it also deserves an accolade for a quieter achievement.
You might think that among the shortlisted titles - also including Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015, Keith Gray’s Ostrich Boys, and Jenny Valentine’s Broken Soup - Saci Lloyd’s was obviously the “greenest”, with its theme of carbon rationing in the near future. But Just Henry is just as green, because it is a product of the Ethical Egmont initiative masterminded by Egmont production director Alison Kennedy. |
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Publishing
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Written by Trevor Dolby
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Wednesday, 07 January 2009 15:00 |
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It's official. We are all going to hell in a handcart. The Daily Mail says so, BBC News says so, and - most important - Robert Peston says so. From Tiverton to Tobermory, journalists rove high streets brandishing microphones like cudgels despatching optimists and jostling pessimists with gleefully leading questions: "It must be terrible watching your life go down the toilet?" They loiter out front of provincial Woolworths fabricating statements about the concerns of employees and shoppers. They swarm at Whittard and Zavvi. One after another these hacks end their pieces with "and people are just worried which retailer will be next and if their job is the next on the line". Jonathan Ross may not be worth a thousand of these mass-produced pace-the-high-street-and- spout-bollocks-very-er-slowly-er-TV-journalists, but it's a close call. |
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Children's
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Written by Nicolette Jones
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Friday, 02 January 2009 11:44 |
January used to be a quiet month for children’s books. The conventional deluge, as in all genres, was in the autumn, in the hope of grabbing a share of the Christmas market. High-selling paperbacks, humour books and light reads came out in the early summer, for holiday reading. Non-fiction was big in August/September for back-to-school. And the spring was busy, with an eye to the Easter-round-ups. But increasingly in recent years January has come in like a lion. It is perceived to be a time of year that gives significant new titles a chance, and takes advantage of Book Token business, while big names are no longer held back.
This year, for instance, the month is graced by some of our finest children’s writers. |
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