YLR Archive Index

Issue 30: Spring 2001

A Link in the Chain: Aidan Chambers

Receiving the Carnegie is somewhat like dying. Newspapers publish articles about you that read like obituaries, which are usually full of praise the deceased never heard in his lifetime. People say wonderful things you had no idea they thought. And if my experience is anything to go by, some articles claim facts-of-your-life which are as much fiction as your novels. You discover you’re not who you imagined you were.

Not only that, people you haven’t heard from for years get in touch again. In the days following the award announcement, I received over three hundred letters, cards, phone calls and e-mails not only from present friends and acquaintances but also from former colleagues and now middle-aged ex-pupils last seen forty years ago, and even from their mothers. I find I have friends I didn’t know were friends. These renewed contacts were as unexpected as receiving the award, which was a total surprise.

At first, I tried to pretend it didn’t matter. I’ve always told myself as well as others that awards shouldn’t affect what one writes, that one should write only because one has to, regardless of anyone else’s opinion. And though it is true that the award won’t change what I write, I have to admit, now the event has finally sunk in, that it is a fillip. How could recognition at this level be otherwise? It comforts you in the determination to go on going on.

The Carnegie Medal differs from other major awards because it is not commercial. I don’t just mean that no money comes with it but that the other awards are given in order to help sell a product. The Booker is meant to help sell food, the Whitbread to help sell booze, and the Smarties to help sell sweets to children. Only the Carnegie is about books themselves and for their own sake.

What’s more, the winners are selected by a democratic process unknown in the other prizes, and the award is given by librarians. I sometimes wonder if the public at large, not to mention politicians, quite understand how essential to our cultural and industrial life is the free public library system. For example, just to take one aspect of the issue, it is pointless teaching people to read if they do not have access to all forms of print, whether in books or electronically delivered. And for the people who need it most – the least well-off – the only certain form of access, the institution they cannot do without, is the free public library. I would never have been able to write a book, let alone one good enough to receive the Carnegie, without that help in my young days. Children’s and youth librarians are as important as teachers in the reading life of young people.

Children’s and youth librarians are as important as teachers in the reading life of young people. Their most valuable expertise is knowledge of the books. (Which is why we must return to training specialist children’s librarians. Learning on the job, at the child reader’s expense, is not good enough.) To be given the oldest British children’s book award by such a group of people is an honour comparable to no other in British literary life.

The first Carnegie Medal was given to Arthur Ransome. His books The Coot Club and The Big Six so impressed me – I was about thirteen when I read them, and a late-comer to reading – that I persuaded my father to take me to the Norfolk Broads, where, without benefit of any handbook or teacher other than Ransome’s novels, we taught ourselves to sail in a little dinghy that was as close as we could find to the one sailed by the doctor’s son in The Coot Club.

There are fifty-nine Carnegie recipients between Ransome and me. It pleases me that my book is now part of the chain stretching across the years, each link marking out a stage, a fashion, a literary phase, a way of thinking in the history of children’s and young people’s books in Britain. No other award provides that historic satisfaction.

Of course, there are coincidental benefits: considerably increased sales, renewed attention to one’s other books, more foreign editions than before, interest from makers in other media, and, best of all, new and more readers. The downside is that the increase in requests for talks and appearances cut into the time, settled at home, needed to write another book. That work is temporarily put back – but that’s a small price to pay. And at least I have an idea of what my obituaries will say when the time finally comes for me to cock my toes.