News & Events

Anthony McGowan and Shaun Tan awarded CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals

On Wednesday evening news media announced that Anthony McGowan has won the CILIP Carnegie Medal for his novel Lark and that Shaun Tan has scooped the Kate Greenaway Award for Illustration for Tales from the Inner City.

Shaun Tan, of Australian, Chinese and Malay heritage, is the first illustrator of colour to win the Greenaway Medal in its history. He is a man of many gifts; an artist and a writer, an animator on the film WALL-E and an Academy Award-winning director for the short film The Lost Thing. In Tales from the Inner City (age 11-15), a collection of twenty-five short stories, Tan explores a world where animals and humans coexist.

Tony McGowan is third time lucky (and deserving!), having been nominated for the Carnegie Award on two previous occasions. We feel very privileged that he was able to visit Croydon High on 9 March as part of our World Book Day celebrations. He confided in us that he regards Lark, with its evocative sense of place, as his finest novel. It is the final book in the ‘Brock’ series, but also a powerful stand-alone novella. It marks the first medal win for the independent publisher Barrington Stoke, which pioneers dyslexia-friendly fiction. It features two brothers, Nick, and Kenny, who has learning difficulties. The boys are waiting for a visit from their long-estranged mother. To ease the tension, they decide to go for a walk on the Yorkshire Moors with their precious dog, a little fox terrier named Tina. The brothers think this will be a real ‘lark’, but when they are caught in a blizzard things become dangerous. Lark (age 13 and up; available as an ebook via LRC VLE BOOKS on the Firefly dashboard) is funny, tense and poignant.

McGowan on his visit to Croydon High in March.

The Carnegie Book Club Girls have enjoyed weekly virtual meetings since lockdown, exploring those of the 8 shortlisted books which are available online. While the Carnegie Medal Award has been announced, the shadowing activities have been extended until the end of October; the group will continue to meet during the first half of the autumn term. There will be an opportunity to vote for the Shadowers’ Choice Award, a fairly new award which evolved out of CILIP’s (the Library and Information Association) 2018 Diversity Review, which identified opportunities to empower and celebrate the young people involved in the Medals through the shadowing scheme by giving them a more significant voice and visible presence in the process and prize giving.

CDN

Mrs Karen Abrams

LRC Manager