Carnegie / Greenaway News

Speech by Sharon Creech winner of the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2002

sharon and children outside new college Thank you. I am deeply honored to be standing here today.

Bloomsbury’s Sarah Odedina phoned me with the news of this award. Her voice was so sober, giving away nothing. We talked of other things first and then she quietly added: “Sharon, Ruby Holler has received the Carnegie Medal.” Pause. Long, long pause while she awaited my response. My half of the conversation went something like this: “What? No! What?” And then I was incoherent, because I was so touched and so stunned and I sobbed a bit.

Now imagine hearing such incredible news, and then imagine hearing the following: “But you can not tell anyone. The news is embargoed…” Embargoed. It sounded so forbidding. And so I did not tell anyone. Except for my husband… and my daughter… and my sister. But because I could not tell anyone else this startling news, I began to think I imagined it. And so, I am relieved to be standing here today with confirmation that this, at least, is not one of my fictions.

I would like to thank a few people and then say a little about Ruby Holler. First, to the judges: I am forever indebted to you for finding my little book: thank you. I hope that people don’t question your sanity too much. To the incredible organization known as CILIP and to all the librarians and teachers and publishers and booksellers who carry the banner for reading: thank you. To my fellow shortlistees: I’m honored to be on this list with you. To Sarah Odedina, and everyone at Bloomsbury, and to Joanna Cotler and HarperCollins in the States: thank you for loving my manuscript and turning it into a beautiful book. To my agents, Amy Berkower and Dorie Simmonds: thank you for your kindness and your humor and for helping me to do what I do.

To Marion Lloyd at Macmillan: thank you for discovering me. To my husband, Lyle, for a thousand, thousand things: thank you.
And my last thank you goes to the thousands of children who took part in the shadowing scheme. It’s astounding to think of so many children reading, reading, reading these past two months. As I read through the candid posted comments from children about all the shortlisted books, I was… enlightened.

For each book, there were readers who loved it and readers who loathed it. It is a good reminder of how individual an experience reading can be. So, for all of you who loved Ruby Holler, thank you for saying so. For the few who loathed it, including the one who called it a ‘snoozefest’; and the teacher who would not like to spend an evening with me; and the boy who said that if he were given the choice between reading this book again and cleaning his teeth with sulphuric acid, he’d take the acid… well, to those readers: I’m sorry, but I’m glad you found other books on the list to love.

And now to Ruby Holler. Whenever anyone asks me where I get my ideas, I am reminded of something Albert Einstein once said. When asked if he kept a journal of ideas, he replied, “Well, I only ever had the one idea…” Ruby Holler grew out of one line in a letter from my aunt, in which she related a story about my father when he was young. She ended the story with this line: “And that was when we lived in the holler.” Holler? I thought. What holler?? I began to imagine such a place – what a wonderful place it would be – and to wonder who might live there, and who might most appreciate it.
From the beginning, I kept hearing another line in my head, one I once heard another educator say: “Every child needs and deserves beauty.” As I wrote this book, I wondered if children who had been deprived of it would be able to recognize and appreciate that beauty? And so, as I travelled with, and laughed with, and loved these “trouble twins,” Dallas and Florida, I hoped that they would find – and be nourished by – a beautiful, open place where they could be free and safe, with people who would care for them. Their search ends with the ‘welcome-home bacon’ that assures them of that home, in a place called Ruby Holler.

This book could not have been written if I had not left my home country with my two young children, in 1979, to come to England to teach in an international school. The impulse to make that move owes something to my father’s English and Scottish roots, and it owes something to all the literature courses I had taken – all that dreaming of Dickens and Shakespeare and Wordsworth. Maybe I would walk the paths that my ancestors and these writers had walked. Here I taught British literature to students from all over the world. When we studied Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, we jumped on the train and took our own pilgrimage to Canterbury. We read Shakespeare and then hopped up to Stratford to see where Shakespeare lived and to walk the path he walked to Anne

Hathaway’s house. We strolled through Dickens’ London; zipped over to Wales for a dose of Dylan Thomas; dashed up to Scotland for a bit of Burns; and back down to the Lake District to ‘wander lonely as a cloud’ thru Wordsworth’s field of daffodils.

Maybe your familiarity with these writers and these places allows you to take them for granted, but for me and my students, these were extraordinary journeys. We were beginning to see how the worlds these writers lived in helped to shape what they wrote. My time here - 17 years - nearly a third of my life - shaped me. And your rich literary heritage is my foundation. My husband (whom I met here), and my children and I found Ruby Hollers all over Great Britain, and we found our own special one in the village of Thorpe, in Surrey. My characters may talk like Americans, but they, like me, have their own British roots.

You will probably find, in all my books, some exploration of how we are shaped by people and by place. And in some of them, you will probably see that I also feel we are often shaped by words and poems and stories, and by the fictional people and places we encounter. I hope you all find your own Ruby Hollers in which to dwell, at least for a time… And finally, thank you again, for this ‘welcome-home bacon,’ this beautiful, beautiful honor.