Neil Gaiman

Go to the School Library Journal for an article about Neil Gaiman. It takes the form of an interview with Roger Sutton, editor of Horn Book. Gaiman, who started out as an author of comics, is on a roll just now, having recently won the Newbery Medal (American equivalent of our Carnegie) for The graveyard book and seen his earlier book, Coraline, filmed. Both titles, along with other books by Gaiman, are in stock at Jordanhill Library.

Carnegie / Greenaway awards

In a recent press release the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) described changes to the shadowing scheme for its prestigious book awards:

"Since 1994, teachers and librarians across the country have used the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Awards shadowing scheme to engage young people with quality fiction and picture books. This year CILIP has made major developments to the accompanying website. Building on the popularity of social networking sites, the shadowing website’s new features allow for more interaction between reading groups across the UK and overseas. Young readers will have increased ownership of the website and be able to customise their group’s homepage. New features will allow groups to:

• Upload video content and write blogs
• Design individual questionnaires and polls for everyone to participate in
• Highlight favourite authors or illustrators from the current shortlist
• Link to past winning books in the ‘Living Archive’ via the ‘step back in time’ function

CILIP is committed to promoting the library as a democratic, fun place in which to read and discuss books outside the classroom. The shadowing scheme helps children develop creative responses to reading and to interact and debate their favourite books with other young people and the website is an increasingly important tool to enable this."

Some new journal articles

Two interesting journals have just come in.

February 2009's EnglishDramaMedia is a special issue on teaching poetry. Articles include Drafting, sharing, hearing, seeing in which Sue Dymoke writes about teaching poetry with ICT, and Poetry Online in which Jean Sprackland and Julie Blake introduce the rich resources of the Poetry Archive. (And don't forget our own poetry page).

Books for Keeps (March 09) has an article by David Wood who has adapted Philippa Pearce's Tom's midnight garden as a stage play. It's regular Authorgraph looks at Terry Deary, and it's Classics in short feature considers Edward Ardizzone's Johnny the clockmaker.

Find them both upstairs on the Serials Gallery.

OU children's literature course

The Open University has a new course (EA 300) on children's literature, suitable for teachers and children's librarians. Participants will learn about the distinctiveness and purposes of children's literature, its prestigious and popular modes and its different representations of children's worlds. The course does this by providing a broad introduction to the vibrant and growing field of children's literature studies, covering children's literature in English ranging from its beginnings in eighteenth-century chapbooks and fairy tales, through seminal nineteenth-century novels, to contemporary examples of fiction illustrating current trends. It also includes the study of picture books old and new, stage performance and film, storytelling and poetry.

Julia Donaldson

There's an article in today's Guardian about Julia Donaldson. Best known for her Gruffalo picture books, she has now written her first book for older children. Running on the Cracks, for age 11+, is published on Monday by Egmont at £6.99. It's also on order for the Library. In it, the protagonist, a runaway, stumbles into the world of the mentally ill. It is a world Julia knows intimately. She navigated through it with increasing desperation for more than a decade with her husband, Malcolm, as they tried to help Hamish, their eldest son. This book is dedicated to his memory, and the article describes how the family has tried to cope with his eventual suicide.

Children's writing

In January, the National Literacy Trust held a policy breakfast, "Enjoyment, confidence and reading: the keys for the success of writing in the 21st century." At the event, a range of expert leaders discussed issues facing writing in schools, as well as the best ways to teach and support writing in the future. Bestselling children’s author and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz led the discussion, throughout which, the group repeatedly stressed the absolute centrality of reading to writing. In fact, it is possible to tell what a child has been reading from the style and tone of
their writing. Children are sometimes identified as having a lack of imagination when in reality the problem is a poverty of reading. Children obtain imaginative building blocks from reading stories and reading is, therefore, essential to imagination and writing. You can read the whole report here.

World Book Day

World Book Day is next week, the 5th March. To mark it, we've updated our Read Around the World booklist, featuring picture books and stories set in a variety of countries. You can find it in the library, or on our Children's Booklists page.