Last Word on the Carnegie Medal by Paul May

You might think that, having read all 84 Carnegie Medal winning books, I would be able to tell you how to write a Carnegie Medal winning book. Sadly, I can't. But if winning the Carnegie is your aim in life then I can give you a few pointers, starting with a few things not to do:

Don't write non-fiction books. Despite what it says on the Carnegie website you have virtually no chance of winning with facts.

Don't write poetry (unless you're prepared to turn your poetry into a novel - see below!). No poetry collection has ever won the Carnegie.

Don't write fiction for 5-8 year olds. This vitally important area of children's reading experience has been almost entirely neglected by the judging panels over the years. Any one of the books in Alan Garner's Stone Book Quartet, for example, would have deserved to win, but they weren't even shortlisted. Jane Gardam committed both this error and the next one when she had two books highly commended in the same year, 1981, but didn't win with either. The Hollow Land, was a short story collection, and Bridget and William, was written for younger children.

Don't write collections of short stories unless, like Geraldine McCaughrean in A Pack of Lies, you can find a clever way of embedding your stories in a larger narrative. The Carnegie was awarded to Walter de la Mare and Eleanor Farjeon for story collections but that was a long time ago. 

Don't get someone else to write your book for you. No ghostwritten book has won so far, but I suppose there's always a first time. I don't think the rules say you have to have written your own book but I suppose they didn't think it needed saying.

So, are there any 'Dos'? 

I'm not sure there are, other than to say that if winning the Carnegie is your ambition you should almost certainly write for older children or teenagers. Realism is probably best, maybe with a touch of magic or oddness, and historical fiction is also a good bet. Writing a really excellent book is a good idea, but that certainly doesn't guarantee you a win. Three of the last ten winners have been written in verse, so that might be a help. In 2019 three of the eight shortlisted titles were in verse.

Of course, it's equally difficult to say how to write a best seller. Some Carnegie winners have been best sellers but many more have not.  I'm sure most children's authors are not like Lee Child (and certainly not as wealthy) in that they simply write the books they want to write and then try to get them published, rather than deliberately setting out to write a best seller, or indeed a Carnegie winner.

Reading all these winners hasn't taught me how to win the Carnegie, but it has thrown up some wonderful surprises, which is what I hoped would happen when I began back at the start of 2020. My main aim was to find out more about those writers I'd never read and, in some cases, never even heard of. Many of the surprises came from reading other books by the winning authors. I've no interest in compiling a league table of my favourite winners. Instead, here's a selection of surprising finds that you might enjoy, and links to the posts where they're discussed.

1. The novels of Walter de la Mare. I knew de la Mare mainly through his poems and anthologies and had never even heard of The Three Mulla Mulgars (or The Three Royal Monkeys in its alternative title), or of his very strange novel, Memoir of a Midget. There's also a huge biography by Theresa Whistler.

2. Elfrida Vipont. Vipont wrote the text of The Elephant and the Bad Baby but she also wrote a series of semi-autobiographical novels starting with The Lark in the Morn and continuing with the Carnegie winning The Lark on the Wing. These books opened a window onto a world I'd never encountered before, young working women sharing flats in London after the end of WW2. The novels are also about Quaker society and the Quaker-run businesses where the girls often work. The books linked up for me things I knew about Quaker involvement in the temperance movement, Quaker chocolate businesses like Cadbury's and Rowntree's and my own family's Quaker ancestors who ran temperance coffee stalls and cafés in Norwich. Elfrida Vipont wrote plenty of other books, many on Quaker subjects, as well as some adventure stories for boys published under the name Charles Vipont.

3. William Mayne. I want to mention him here in order to argue that we should separate the books from the man and value them for their remarkable qualities. I'll stop reading them when everyone stops using Gill Sans font and all the other fonts based on it, and all of Eric Gill's sculptures are removed from public places. A Swarm in May remains one of my favourite children's books, and Mayne's Carnegie winner, A Grass Rope, while not as good, is still a remarkable book. And actually even if they did cancel Eric Gill's work I'd still read William Mayne.

4. Charles Keeping. It's hard to imagine Rosemary Sutcliff's winner, The Lantern Bearers without Keeping's cover and illustrations and I wonder if The God Beneath the Sea would have won without his illustrations (The Golden Shadow is even better). Mollie Hunter benefitted from his wonderful cover for The Stronghold, and it seems a shame that he wasn't commissioned to provide illustrations too, as he did for Mollie Hunter's lovely first book, Patrick Kentigern Keegan. You can visit The Keeping Gallery in South London by appointment, and that's where I'll be on the day this post is published.

5. Mollie Hunter. She's an author I hadn't read who seems shamefully neglected south of the border (she was Scottish). Mollie Hunter was big in the USA where she toured with her kilted husband and gave talks on children's literature (she also wrote a book about writing for children called Talent is not Enough). I've read a lot of her books now. They are never less than very good, and often outstanding. In particular I recommend the semi-autobiographical A Sound of Chariots. Probably more like 7/8 autobiographical. That first book I mentioned above is great too with its Keeping illustrations, and I recently read The Walking Stones which is a perfect example of the way Mollie Hunter could integrate the supernatural into everyday modern life.

6. Robert Westall. His work was always interesting and often brilliant. If you like cats, he's the man for you. Three of his novels are among my very favourite children's books. His first book, The Machine Gunners, won the Carnegie. Just as good is another book set in WW2, The Kingdom by the Sea, which won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award, and then there's Gulf, set during the first Gulf war and like nothing else I've ever read. I also recommend Westall's autobiography about his childhood, The Making of Me. 

7. Terry Pratchett. It's a funny one, this. For years I've attempted to read Pratchett's adult books and found myself unable to get on with them. And then I read The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents and loved it. I think it's a brilliant children's book, right up there with the very best. So I tried another Discworld novel and it was no good. I mean, I'm sure it's good. People love them. Just not for me. So I think I'll stick to his children's books, and reading Maurice was one of the biggest surprises of this whole project.

8. Geraldine McCaughrean. Where the World Ends is a remarkable achievement and if I haven't enjoyed others of McCaughrean's books quite as much, that may well be because it's hard to imagine anything else being as good.

9. Anthony McGowan. OK, I said I wasn't going to pick a favourite, but if I had to take just one Carnegie Winner to a desert island it would be Lark. I'd take it to remind me how much can be expressed in clear, direct language that anyone of any age can read and understand. 

And finally let's remember that the list of Carnegie Medal winners tells us almost nothing about what children have actually been reading for the last 90 years. I mentioned that story collections have no chance of winning the Carnegie, so it's no surprise that Michael Bond's Paddington never had a sniff. Nor did William Brown, or My Naughty Little Sister, or Milly-Molly-Mandy, or Clever Polly. All these books are still in print and selling well.

Here are a few authors who haven't won the Carnegie. I'm sure you can think of more: Jane Gardam, Jacqueline Wilson, Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, JRR Tolkien, Terry Deary, Alison Uttley, Brian Jacques, Geoffrey Trease, Henry Treece, Joan Aiken, J K Rowling, Malcolm Saville, Susan Cooper, Catherine Storr . . . I won't even mention all the mountains of series fiction. 

Even more finally I'll end this whole Carnegie thing by quoting from I W Cornwall's The Making of Man, the last non-fiction book to win the Carnegie (in 1960). Non-fiction books can date more quickly than novels, but Ian Cornwall managed to say things that still resonate today:

'We, as individuals, are already so specialised, each in his own part of the work of our brittle civilisation, that most of the civilised survivors of some world-wide conflict or cataclysm would starve in a month or two.

Man now stands alone indeed, on a pinnacle of his own contriving, from which it would be only too easy for him to fall. Life would still go on, only retreating a little to make another leap forward.

The death of the dinosaurs might have seemed, to an observer gifted with reason but not foresighted, to be a disastrous destruction of the finest and most advanced creatures that nature could devise. We now know that their eclipse merely made room for the new experiment to begin, which has culminated in our own species. The 80 foot monsters with hen's-egg-sized brains could not have conceived of men. How, then, can we hope to imagine what sort of natural beings will take our places if—or, rather, when—homo sapiens becomes extinct? They will be different. That is all we know.'

Have a good Christmas!