Children's book miscellany

Stuff about specific authors:

David Almond has won the 2010 Hans Christian Andersen Award. Every other year IBBY presents this to a living author and illustrator whose complete works have made a lasting contribution to children's literature.

Theresa Breslin's web page is currently advertising a drama competition based on her latest novel, Prisoner of the Inquisition, in which secondary schools can win £1000 worth of books in a competiton.

Morris Gleitzman tells the Perth Writers Festival (i.e. the Australian one) about his latest book, and how he became a writer, in an hour long podcast.

Meg Harper writes about school visits in Being Nice - if you are planning on organising an author visit, read this first and learn how not to do it!

Eric Hill celebrates Spot's 30th birthday in the Guardian with an audio slideshow showing how he draws 'my little puppy' and explaining how fell into writing the books almost by accident.

More general stuff:

Author Hotline is a school resource of exclusive author, illustrator and poet profiles giving a unique insight into the creative process and enabling young readers to connect with published professionals.

Barrington Stoke publishes fantastic books for dyslexic and struggling readers. We have a selection of their books in our catalogue and link to them from our Reluctant Readers page. For an opinion piece on them, see Bookwitch's blog.

Mrs P is an award-winning free interactive digital storybook destination - classic children’s stories brought to life by Kathy Kinney as Mrs. P.

Storytubes is a US site where kids enter a competiton to make short videos about their favourite books. Award winning entries are on the site - many of the titles will be known to Scottish children too and would make great introductions to the books, or they might give you ideas for your own videos.

Heroes / sheroes update

Vote on Lucy Coats' 7 heroes / sheroes of children's literature on her Scribble City blog by 24th March - if you don't know what I'm talking about, see the post two below this one!

Books for Keeps

The latest Books for Keeps has just arrived in the library. As well as the usual news and reviews you will find:

Rosemary Stones on the children's books of the decade.
A retrospective on Brian Wildsmith.
Martin Salisbury's top 10 art titles.
An Authorgraph article on Elizabeth Laird.
A Classics in Short feature on Rosemary Sutcliff's Eagle of the Ninth.

Well worth checking out.

Heroes / sheroes

Lucy Coats has responded to the Guardian's illustrated list of 10 of the best children's book heroes with a poll of her own. She doesn't agree with all the Guardian's choices - read why on her blog, Scribble City Central, where she's asking you to come up with your own top 5 heroes and sheroes. You have to do this by Friday 19th when she will collate the entries and come up with two top 5s. There are prizes to win too! I haven't got my own top 5s together yet but I've backed up the person who voted for Cynthia Voigt's Dicey Tillerman. Homecoming is one of my favourite books, about a young girl whose mother has abandoned her family. Dicey leads her younger brothers and sister on a long journey to find their estranged grandmother. She's a great character - see our catalogue for this and Cynthia's other titles and please borrow them and read them!

Coming soon 2: more films of children's books

With the news that Disney is rebranding its film of Rapunzel as Tangled, Jim Crace in yesterday's Guardian imagines what other children's stories and fairy tales could be made more appealing to boys - Malice in Wonderland for example? I've already mentioned the Percy Jackson film and the forthcoming BBC production of Saci Lloyd's Carbon Diaries (click on the films tag below to see all relevant posts) but don't think I've covered Cressida Cowell's How to train your dragon which is due to come out in a few months time - we have it and other books in the series in the Library.

Cathy Forde's first play

Author of teenage novels, Catherine Forde, has written her first play, Empty. It's part of a season of three new plays written for young people and produced by the National Theatre of Scotland. Forde describes it as black comedy, and it centres round many parents' nightmare, the party that gets out of hand when they are on holiday. Read more in today's Herald and check out Cathy Forde's books from the library.

What boys like

Here's a list from new publisher Nosy Crow who conducted a small survey to discover what boys from 6-9 years old liked to read about. These are the top 5:

1. The future
2. Big zappers (i.e. weapons)
3. Outer space
4. Centre of the earth
5. Sharks

 Follow the link to see the full list. How does it compare to your experiences? Let Nosy Crow know!