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Is there a book you’ve read that you think is worthy of being nominated? Get in touch and let us know what you’ve been reading and which books you think would be worthy contenders for these prestigious awards.
Nominations for the 2020 Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals are open in September 2020. If you are a CILIP member you may also make individual nominations (one title per Medal) – please see www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk for more detail about the Medal criteria and mission for the Awards.
Though the dust has barely settled after the excitement of the Carnegie and Greenaway medal announcements in June, we’re already busy thinking about what we’ll be nominating for the 2019 awards. Our marvellous committee met up to discuss the books that have caught our attention over the past few months…
After much discussion we came up with two shortlists of books to be read over the summer months. If you’d like to read along with us you can find our shortlists below.
We will be holding a discussion day in September looking at how our shortlists measure up against the Carnegie and Greenaway criteria and selecting the two books from each list we think are most worthy of being nominated.
It is also worth bearing in mind that all CILIP members can make nominations in their own right. Eligible titles must be published between 1 September 2017 and 31 August 2018. You can read more about eligibility for the awards on the Medal’s website.
Carnegie Shortlist for Nominations
Greenaway Shortlist for Nominations
The Blurb: From Tanya Landman, author of the 2015 Carnegie Medal winner Buffalo Soldier, comes a heart-stopping tale of love, corruption and the power of choice.
Blood on her lips. Blood on her tongue. Blood that is not her own. Cassia does not fear to die, but for her – for a slave who has maimed her master – there are worse things than death. Yet the mighty Roman Empire has its limits. Beyond her master’s estate, beyond the river, far to the north stands Hadrian’s Wall. And beyond the wall? Freedom. With dogs on her trail and a bounty on her head the journey seems impossible. But then Cassia meets Marcus – slick, slippery, silver-tongued – a true and perfect son of Rome. And her only hope.
The Review:
I’ve thrown myself into the list of CKG nominations this week and selected Tanya Landman’s Beyond The Wall as my first read. It’s no surprise that I went for this one first – I spent many lunchtimes in my school library closeted away with Rosemary Sutcliff and Henry Treece – so this felt like comfort reading of the highest order. And yet it’s not really a comfortable read – with a less benign outlook than Sutcliff, Tanya Landman’s version of Roman Britain is definitely aimed at an older YA audience.
It’s the story of ‘a runaway slave and her journey through the murky underworld of Roman Britain’. There’s action aplenty as Cassia flees from the repugnant landowner Titus Cornelius Festus but this is not simply about a slave’s desire for freedom; the oppression Cassia is fleeing from is very specifically violent and sexual. Landman deftly interweaves a thorough examination of the position (read oppression) of women at all levels of society through her fast paced and perilous plot.
It left me thinking two things:
1) Just how good and varied Tanya Landman’s historical fiction is – Beyond The Wall is so different from Carnegie winning Buffalo Soldier and yet reading the author’s note at the end it was very clearly born of the same creative process.
2) The second thing is really more of a lament – Why are there not more YA books set in the Roman world? After the heyday of Sutcliff et al it seems that Rome has fallen out of favour (or fashion) and yet Landman shows that it’s just as pertinent a backdrop for YA fiction now as it ever was. Through Cassia and Marcus we traverse tricky ideas about freedom from oppressive rule, foreign occupation, materialism, a return to a way of life more connected with the natural world as well as investigating female sexuality and ideas of consent – all topics which wouldn’t feel out of place in one of today’s newspapers. Landman takes all these threads and throws them together to make a thrilling and emotionally intelligent adventure story – Not a bad way to kick off CKG 2018 I reckon!
Lizzie
It’s always an exciting day when the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway nominations are announced. It marks the first step in an extraordinary reading journey that will take us all the way to the announcement of the winners in June next year. Moreover, it’s a wonderful insight into the books that fellow librarians have been reading and recommending and with a total of 237 books nominated across the two awards this year there’s no doubt that we’ve got a couple of months of outstanding reading ahead.
Over the last couple of years I’ve inadvertently developed my own ritual for nomination announcement day: after printing a nice crisp copy of the lists, I take an inexplicable joy in wielding a highlighter across them to see how many I have read. The necessity has also sadly developed in recent years to denote books on the lists that I have in my possession but have not yet had time to read so there’s also the added excitement of colour coding going on!
Sometimes it’s been scary to see how many I’ve not got around to reading – I like to think that I stay up to date with recent publications and this can be a bit of a wake up call – but for the most part it’s a welcome challenge. I’m fairly certain that I’m not going to manage to read them all, probably not even close, but past experience has taught me that these lists hold treasures and there’s genuine delight in the anticipation of what I’m going to find.
I’m already looking forward to the announcement of the longlists in February – highlighter at the ready!
You can see the full lists and award timetable on the CKG Website
Happy reading everyone!
Lizzie
We’re inviting all the delegates at our Unconference to vote for the 4 books that the Northwest Committee can put forward as our CKG nominations for 2017. Committee members will be championing a shortlist of 6 books for each award and discussing how we think each of the books we’ve selected measures up to the Medal criteria.
We’d really like your votes to count so we’re inviting you to read along with us. Copies of each of the titles will be available on the day but it would make all the difference if you’d had a chance to look at some of the books beforehand and (fingers crossed) felt happy to contribute to our discussions on the day.
Of course if you’re unable to attend our Unconference we’d still love it if you’d take a look at these books – we think they really are among the best books published in the last year and we’d love to know what you made of them too.
Our shortlisted titles are as follows- Happy Reading!
Carnegie
Where Monsters Lie – Polly Ho-Yen
The House On Hummingbird Island – Sam Angus
These Shallow Graves – Jennifer Donnelly
Time Travelling With A Hamster – Ross Welford
Salt To The Sea – Ruta Sepetys
Orbiting Jupiter – Gary D Schmidt
Greenaway
Counting Lions – Stephen Walton
Green Lizards vs Red Rectangles: A Story About War and Peace – Steve Antony
There Is A Tribe Of Kids – Lane Smith
Much Ado About Shakespeare – Donovan Bixley
The Marvels – Brian Selznick
Circle – Jeannie Baker
