Carnegie and Greenaway winners

My predictive powers on Tuesday fell short again - and of course it is not possible to wish Siobhan Dowd congratulations after her untimely death in 2007, but "Bog Child" is a very worthy winner. Big congratulations must also go to Catherine Rayner who won this year's Greenaway with the fabulous Harris Find His Feet. We did an event with Catherine back in May, and both her and her work are vibrant and infectiously wonderful, and again - a very worthy winner.

Greenaway Reading Club

Today was the second meeting of our Greenaway Reading Club - last time we reviewed Penguin by Polly Dunbar (very popular, a high benchmark was set) and today we did two books: Banana by Ed Vere and Monkey & Me by Emily Gravett.

The idea of the club is to give young children the chance to read and review books, just like the judges of the real Greenaway Awards (annual awards for children's picture books). This is a bit like the Shadowing groups run by schools, but ours is ghtly different in that a) it takes place in the , b) it can get a bit chaotic and c) real bananas were eaten at the end of the two stories.

Alison who runs the club gets the kids to consider all aspects of the book - the cover design, illustrations, use of colour, the emotions that the pictures can provoke. They then get a chance to draw in the style of the various illustrators, and vote on how much they liked the book. So far the voting has been high for all the books, although the 10 million' votes received by Ed Vere's book today might have to be statistically rounded down to 10 when we do the counting...

The club takes place on Monday after school, 4 until 5, and there are still places if anyone wants to join. Ages 7-12 welcome.

The Great Carnegie Book Hunt

Last year, when the Carnegie and Greenaway shortlists were announced, we naively thought "ooh, we'll have one of each of the shortlist for the shop, make a nice display". After a quick call to one of the major wholesalers, it dawned on us that we had somewhat missed the boat. 'Ere, Bert, gentleman on line two says he wants some carnegie shortlist titles dear oh dear, you're 'aving' a laugh, etc. It quickly became clear that a) before the shortlist was announced, half the titles were OP in hardback and not yet published in paperback, and b) the ones that weren't available were snapped up by 8.15 the following morning. So this year we were ready. This year, we have launched a Greenaway shadowing group in the shop, and we also had some orders for titles off the Carnegie list to fulfill, so the whole thing was planned like the proverbial military campaign. First, the entire longlist was recced, titles were noted in terms of availability in hardback, paperback, stock amounts for all major wholesalers. Then a number of pre-order baskets were prepared ready for the off. After staying up past midnight (joined by Timothy who wanted to know what all the excitement was about) the moment the shortlist came through on email, the baskets were stripped to their shortlisted essentials and sent off ASAP in the wee small hours. We will discover Saturday morning if our meticulous planning has paid off...read more about the Carnegie shortlist here. Mind you, 3 out of the 7 titles could not be had for love nor money. Elizabeth Laird's Crusade, Tanya Landman's Apache and Meg Rosoff's What I Was are not yet printed in paperback (well, not that we could see) so we have four of the titles coming in (hopefully). It must be a total nightmare for publishers if you have a title on either of the longlists. You can't rush forward the publication date or go for a reprint before the list announcement, just in case it isn't shortlisted. But as soon as it *is* shortlisted, everyone wants a copy. Ho hum...