Growing up with the Carnegie medal
As we wait to find out who's won this year, I've been enjoying looking back at some great previous winners
Of the big British children's book awards, I'm still (impartially) fond of the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, but the Carnegie medal is undoubtedly the most prestigious. Every year I get slightly antsy during the countdown to the winner's announcement, coming this year on Thursday 23 June. It's as though I'm waiting for a miniature midsummer Christmas and if I see a book with the stolidly handsome medal beaming from the cover, my hand steals insensibly to my wallet. I also like the words on the medal's face, "ingenia hominum res publica" a reference to the elder Pliny's statement that Gaius Asinius Pollio, who set up the first Roman public library, made "the talents of mankind public possessions". That's a stirring call to arms for embattled librarians everywhere.
There've been some ripsnorting Carnegie winners since the prize first went to Arthur Ransome, for Pigeon Post, in 1936. The Family From One End Street, Watership Down, The Owl Service, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe scanning down the list must give anyone who loves children's books a tingle of excitement in fingertips itching to open them for the first or hundredth time. It's hard to pick a handful of preferences, let alone plump for the best of the bunch (though Philip Pullman's Northern Lights was voted the "Carnegie of Carnegies" in 2007 by a readers' poll) but, mewling and protesting, I've chosen three favourites from the winners of the past.
Robert Westall's The Scarecrows is a ghost story in the vein of MR James at least, I'm sure that pants-wettingly scary pedagogue would have applauded Westall for investing three straw scarecrows in a field with absolute menace. It's not the pure terror of the malign mannequins that makes this book an outstanding Carnegie winner, though it's the creation of angry, miserable, difficult Simon Wood, a boy who's often acutely dislikeable but who remains impossible to forget. Mourning his father's death with enraged sorrow, Simon gives his mother and sister a hideously hard time, especially when his mum's new love interest Joe, an overweight, sardonic political cartoonist, appears on the scene. When his mother remarries and the family move home, Simon experiences such fury and anguish that he unwittingly allows malevolent forces to make us! e of him . The book has left me with an abiding fear of scarecrows, but I also remember feeling incredibly sorry for Simon when Joe, provoked beyond bearing, caricatures him with cruel, adult accuracy, capturing him for all time at his childish worst.
Margaret Mahy's The Changeover is another supernatural Carnegie winner which will always stay with me, partly because I read it when, like the protagonist, I was in the throes of early adolescence. Laura Chant, a gawky, psychically sensitive 14-year-old living in a New Zealand suburb, is forced to enlist the help of the mysterious Sorenson Carlisle, a male witch well-disguised as a geeky school prefect, when an evil parasitic force begins to batten upon her little brother. During the book Laura changes from child to young adult, and from "sensitive" to fully-fledged witch. The passage during which she comes into her power is rich with poetry and danger (she drinks from a wine cup containing "the blood of grapes, the juice of a girl", encountering trees made of eyes and invisible, lacerating brambles of doubt on her way through). I remember The Changeover as intensely frightening, too for a while I superstitiously turned the cover to the wall, scared witless by the baddie and his disguise as a cheery, fat-faced antique dealer but what remains with me is Mahy's perfect distillation of the tremulous, enormous excitement of beginning to feel independent and ready to fall in love. Like a lot of readers trapped at the "awkward age" between downy duckling and sophisticated swan, I would have given a lot to undergo a rite of passage that left me both an adult and a witch.
Finally, I'd like to tip my hat to the Carnegie panel that gave Melv! yn Burge ss's Junk the laurels in 1996. It can't have been an easy choice, but it's the best book I've read about the fear-clouded, glamorously nebulous issue of teenage drug use, even 15 years down the line. The characters, particularly the protagonists Tar and Gemma, are painfully real, and their first-person narration shoves and hustles the reader into squats and alleys, seeing every nasty detail along the way parental abuse, paid-for sex to feed the heroin habit, a baby born addicted, the seductive sensations of the high itself and the dully dawning realisation that the whole of life has become enslaved to its pursuit. I like a lot of things about the book, although it makes me wince throughout its refusal to present a heavy-handed "Thou shalt not", its acknowledgement that nice middle-class girls can also be thoroughly bad influences, and its heartbreaking ending all give it heft and longevity, well beyond being a controversy-courting, "issues novel".
My Carnegie choices all involve extreme, fearful situations addiction, grief, terror, abuse, inimical magic but it's the well-drawn protagonists negotiating them who make them unforgettable to me, and worthy winners. Characters who make huge mistakes, behave badly, who don't always emerge unscathed or even whole, but who weather horrors and learn from them are a critical part of what I find gripping about the Carnegie's list of winners.
Tomorrow's medallist, whether it's Jason Wallace's English schoolboy adapting painfully to life in a just-independent Zimbabwe, Patrick Ness's conclusion to the Chaos Walking trilogy, in which dealing with warring aliens and a lack of psychic privacy makes Monsters of Men, or any! of the others on the six-strong shortlist, will add another trophy to the hoard.
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