Updates from our Carnegie Reading Group

A year on and our Carnegie Reading Group is still going strong. We are a group of current and ex-Goldsmiths MA students who meet on a 3-weekly basis to discuss one of the Carnegie Medal Winners. As you may have seen in previous blogposts I kicked off this ‘project’ back in April or May 2020. We were in Lockdown One with all the uncertainties that entailed and a course I had planned to take in the Summer Term was cancelled as Michael Rosen, who ran it, was in hospital with COVID. Casting about for something useful to do while in limbo (other than navigating homeschooling, volunteering to bring out food to the local community and enjoying some fantastic weather, which we could frankly do with now, too!) I decided to read the Carnegie Winners in chronological order from the beginning and blog about the progress.

I also asked my fellow students if they were interested in reading along with me. Thankfully some were keen to do so and our three-weekly chats have been part of my new social network, undisrupted by Covid, partial lockdown, full-lockdown, cancelled Christmas, travel bans stopping me from seeing my family etc.

So, where are we now? First, we read one Carnegie Medal from each decade from the 1930s onwards:

*The family from One End Street by Eve Garnett

The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge

*The Borrowers by Mary Norton

*Tom’s Midnight Garden by Phillipa Pearce

*The Owl Service by Alan Garner

The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler by Gene Kemp

The Change Over by Margaret Mahy

*Skellig by David Almond

*A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly

Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd

The Graveyard Child by Neil Gaiman

Buffalo Soldier by Tanya Landman

Then we went on to read the (remaining) Carnegies of Carnegies, i.e. the ‘top 10 Carnegies. We had already read quite a few of the Carnegie of Carnegies – they are the ones marked with a star above. The remaining ones which we read next were:

Junk by Melvyn Burgess

Storm by Kevin Crossland-Holland

Northern Lights by Philip Pullman

The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall

Then we read Here Lies Artur by Philip Reeve for no other reason that I had read it, loved it and was going to include it in my MA dissertation and was curious to hear what other people thought of it.

After that, we read Lark, the latest winner, followed by, at the next meeting coming up, one of this year’s shortlists: Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo.

Where to next? Maybe we’ll cycle back through the decades – it is quite ‘useful’ to read some of the earlier ones which are sometimes forgotten and difficult to get hold of. I will keep you updated on progress!

PS. As you all know, thankfully Michael Rosen is back on fine form and teaching the module which was cancelled last year. In fact, this is one of the reasons my blogging is not progressing fast – we are being kept to the grind-stone with uni projects!