I have started on a big but exciting project: I am going to read all the Carnegie Medal Winners from the inception of the medal in 1936 until the present day and blog about my progress and thoughts on the books. I will start from the beginning and read in chronological order where possible. Quite a few of the early Carnegie medal winners are out of print and not available secondhand or too expensive (more than £15 or so).
This is both a personal and a professional project. I’m currently doing a MA in Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths, but I don’t have any lectures until October and this seems like a perfect opportunity to investigate what has been considered some of the best children’s literature written in the English language through the last 70+ years. I want to look at the themes which are emerging and to form my own impressions and opinions of the literary history of Children’s Literature. I have persuaded some fellow students to keep me company at least some of the way and we are selecting one book from each decade to ‘meet’ and discuss. One intrepid fellow student is also reading as many of the books as she can, like me.
Margery Fisher wrote in the introduction to Intent upon Reading – a critical appraisal of modern fiction for children’: “Today it is hard to keep abreast of new publications, let alone keep a sense of proportion about them. There is little time to look back at the classics, to recommend them to children who, following the habit of their elders, take the easy way out and ask for the latest story by So-and-so”. This was in 1967 and Fisher was in part looking back on an earlier time where, according to her, Harvey Darton had managed to create a ‘definitive work’; Children’s Books in England. Obviously, this now raises all kinds of questions around who are the tastemakers, how cannons are formed and so on but I also recognise Fisher’s quest for trying to understand what has gone before, to hold on to what is ‘good’, however we define it, and not just look to what is ‘just out’ and newly published.
The Carnegie medal is given to children’s books published in the UK and recognises outstanding literary quality that year. This reading project and this blog is my way of looking back at what has gone before and to understand what is still, in my purely personal opinion, ‘good’ and what time has moved on from. There’s a similar award given to books published in the US, the Newberry Medal – maybe I’ll get on to that list afterwards!
Mette Reads Carnegie 