October 2010
The Skin You Live In
Author: Michael Tyler
Illustrator: David Lee Csicsko
Publisher: Chicago Children's Museum, 32 pages
Year: 2005
ISBN: 978-0975958001
ALL colours and shades of skin are celebrated in this brightly coloured book with its wonderful jaunty text, and cartoon figures that emphasise how we're all different and yet the same.
Eva Ibbotson at home in Newcastle in 2004. Photograph: Ben Cawthra/North News & Pictures, Newcastlevia guardian.co.ukPosted via email from daphnelee's posterous
The children's author Eva Ibbotson died on Wednesday at the age of 85 at her home in Newcastle, it has been confirmed. She was best known for the Amazon adventure tale Journey to the River Sea, winner of the Nestlé children's gold award and shortlisted for the Carnegie medal, and for her funny, magical stories for younger children, including The Secret of Platform 13 and The Great Ghost Rescue.
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Michael Rosen at Ladygrove Park Primary School in Didcot. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardianvia guardian.co.ukPosted via email from daphnelee's posterous
When I was at school, we rarely had interesting visitors to the classroom: the highlight was probably the local policeman, who popped by once a year to show off his panda car. I'm not that old, but in the 20 years since my days of learning times tables, it's clear this has changed, and for the better.
Cash in hand ... JK Rowling receives the Hans Christian Andersen literature award in Odense. Photograph: Kim Rune/Empics Entertainmentvia guardian.co.ukPosted via email from daphnelee's posterous
JK Rowling has become the first winner of a new Danish award, the Hans Christian Andersen literature prize. The author accepted the 500,000 kroner (£60,000) award yesterday at a ceremony in Odense, Denmark, the birthplace of the fairy tale writer.
No, not the Malaysian National Book Awards - is there a Malaysian National Book Award anyway?
The book prize that gets the most press in Malaysia is the Popular Book Award. The reason it gets a lot of press is because the coverage tends to be paid for in the form of advertorials.
The award is named after the organiser (Popular Bookstore) and is also descriptive - the award is for popular books, not necessarily good books. But then again, "popular" in this instance isn't based on sales but votes.
You don't have to have read a book to vote for it and I think Malaysians vote for a variety of nonsensical reasons so I don't take the Popular Book Awards at all seriously.
I received an email from one of the nominees this year asking me to vote for his book. I wanted to email back, saying, "Shouldn't you be asking me to read your book instead of just voting for it?" How could he assume that I had read it? Perhaps he didn't really care. Winning is all that matters to some people. They don't give a damn if they've actually done something worthy of a prize.
Anyway, I digress. The finalists for the National Book Award (USA) 2010 for Young People's Literature are:
Paolo Bacigalupi ~ Ship Breaker
Kathryn Erskine ~ Mockingbird
Laura McNeal ~ Dark Water
Walter Dean Myers ~ Lockdown
Rita Williams-Garcia ~ One Crazy Summer.
You'll find the full list of finalists in all the categories here.
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Children's artist Mini Grey has won many prizes for her work, which ranges from illustrations of classic tales to her stories featuring her own characters. To celebrate the publication of her latest book, Three by the Sea, she talks us through what goes into her pictures.
More here.
Howard Jacobson is tonight (Tuesday 12 October) named the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Finkler Question, published by Bloomsbury.
London author and columnist Howard Jacobson has been longlisted twice for the prize, in 2006 for Kalooki Nights and in 2002 for Who's Sorry Now, but has never before been shortlisted.
The Finkler Question is a novel about love, loss and male friendship, and explores what it means to be Jewish today.
Said to have ‘some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language', The Finkler Question has been described as ‘wonderful' and ‘richly satisfying' and as a novel of ‘full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding'.
This is the third Man Booker winner published by Bloomsbury. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood won the prize in 2000 and The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje in 1992. The publisher has had six shortlisted books including Cats Eye (1989), Alias Grace (1996) and Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood, Lies of Silence (1990) by Brian Moore, Crossing the River (1993) by Caryl Phillips and The Map of Love (1999) by Ahdaf Soueif.
Sir Andrew Motion, Chair of the judges, made the announcement, which was broadcast by the BBC from the awards dinner at London's Guildhall. Peter Clarke, Chief Executive of Man, presented Howard Jacobson with a cheque for £50,000.
Andrew Motion comments ‘The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize.'
Over and above his prize of £50,000, Howard Jacobson can expect a huge increase in sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receives £2,500 and a designer-bound edition of their book.
The judging panel for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was: Andrew Motion (Chair), former Poet Laureate; Rosie Blau, Literary Editor of the Financial Times; Deborah Bull, formerly a dancer, now Creative Director of the Royal Opera House as well as a writer and broadcaster; Tom Sutcliffe, journalist, broadcaster and author and Frances Wilson, biographer and critic.
Sales of the books longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize have been stronger than ever before, with sales over 45% higher than last year.
Read the full press release here.
Michelle Paver, winner of the Guardian children's fiction prize.Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardianvia guardian.co.ukPosted via email from daphnelee's posterous
The writer Michelle Paver has won the 2010 Guardian children's fiction prize for the concluding volume of her bestselling Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, Ghost Hunter. Set in an imagined prehistory, the series follows a young boy called Torak, who finds he can communicate with a wolf cub, and becomes his companion.
Continue reading "Michelle Paver wins Guardian children's fiction prize | Books | guardian.co.uk" »
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