Shaun Tan has been announced as the winner of the 2020 CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for his extraordinary collection Tales from the Inner City,  a collection of illustrated stories and poems exploring the shifting relations between the natural and human environments and the interconnectedness is suffused through these.  Julia Hale, 2020 Chair of judges for the awards describes it as 'a masterwork of illustration'.  YLG was delighted to discuss the awards and illustration with Shaun.

The Kate Greenaway is awarded for outstanding illustration, what qualities do you think make illustration outstanding and how important is it for children and young people?

Gosh, that’s that big question! I guess the word outstanding, broken down, means work that stands out, maybe stands apart a little bit. It’s very hard to put one’s finger on what that is, either in the noise of a book fair or the silence of one’s own desk, but you know it when you see it. It just grabs your attention and demands a second look, then and third, a fourth. Other work may not strike you immediately, but will reward sustained attention, will keep on paying dividends. I think that’s basically the measure of good illustration, if you can keep returning to it again and again, seeing different things, sustaining a certain fire of joy or disturbance, something you could hang on your wall forever and be perfectly happy to see it every morning. But there are no set rules for what that is, it doesn’t even have to be well drawn. To be honest, I’m still trying to figure that out – what makes an outstanding illustration.

How important it is for children and young people? Probably best to ask them individually. But to hazard a guess, I would say simple inspiration. Certainly the feedback I get from most young people involves them wanting to let me know that I’ve inspired them to draw and write. I really appreciate that, because it reminds me of the way I was inspired by other artists and writers as a young person. Just that feeling of mind-opening excitement when certain images reveal a whole new way of looking at the world. I think that’s probably the greatest contribution of illustrated books, especially where the reader is aware that they are created by individuals, people not so different from themselves. It inspires further creativity. Each good book is saying ‘look at what you can do with little more than words and drawings’. It’s an invitation to be an artist, the artist that I believe everybody is, regardless of whether they practice a craft. Just using imagination to test your experience of the world, to see things from other points of view, that makes you an artist.

The mission statement for the awards is to ‘inspire and empower the next generation to create a better world through books and reading.’  To what extent do you feel stories and art are able to act as agents of change?

Good question. I think that basically stories are the way that humans think about complex issues. We are an animal that thinks through story. That probably goes back a very long way, where stories, as a chain of events involving various places, characters and emotions, allowed successive generation to remember very big and complex things. Indigenous Australians are particularly good at this, and have been for thousands of years, understanding an intricate and vast geography through songlines and dreaming stories, connecting narrative directly with the land.

In other contexts, I believe stories have a similar function, they lay down ‘dreaming tracks’ in the mind, provide examples of possible outcomes to possible problems. When faced with a difficult situation, we may well be reminded of an anecdote, a book, a film or any story that suggests a way forward, and the principles to follow – particularly ideas about truth, integrity and empathy. That last one is the most important. Stories are basically about empathy, of imagining what it would be like to be someone else. And then recognising that there is no single story – contrary to fundamentalist thinking – but thousands, well, billions. Lots of different ways that things can go, including ways you cannot yet conceive of. Isn’t that why we read? To see something play out that we could not have imagined alone, to be curious about that, to want to think about it carefully. That’s a very good thing to be interested in. That open-mindedness will help you adapt to whatever life throws at you. And it’s going to throw a lot, the good, the bad, the incomprehensible, the downright depressing. How can you take that all in and still move forward?

You’ve spoken in the past about unease with the term ‘illustration’, are there better or more apt terms?

Of course, the definitions of words broaden out in time, so it doesn’t really matter – and certainly a century or so of children’s book illustration has helped with that a great deal. Anyone who appreciates it well knows that it is not about literal ‘illustration’. That said, the term is still misleading for a mainstream that does not study it closely, and it leads to economic, educational and institutional divisions which tend to favour other art forms over book illustration.

When I was an art student, it was actually considered a derogatory term. But I would then be confused by those celebrated painters who, to my eye, where creating close equivalents to book illustration… When I visited the Sistine Chapel for instance, it looked a lot like commercial illustration to me, albeit for an unusual client. Actually the majority of painters throughout history are illustrators, especially if you look beyond western modernism. When I look at Ancient Egyptian friezes, cave paintings, medieval tapestries, Aztec codices, Hindu temples, I see illustrated, figurative stories, very close to picture books and comics. Images that show things happening, with implied beginnings, middles and endings. So I tend to think in terms of narrative painting and drawing. Some art is about singular impressions, either abstract or figurative, and others are about specific things happening, they are narrative images, or ‘illustration’. I have similar thoughts about science fiction and fantasy, that it seems to me more of an historical mainstream than a modern subgenre. So much of human visual culture is basically fantasy illustration.

In any case, I think a lot of those straitjackets of language and definition are dissolving as more and more artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers cross over, or work in different fields simultaneously. Also, it’s nice to see that the boundaries between children’s and adult literature are often transgressed, and that my own books have come to be regarded as either-or. I think we spend too much time talking about differences between groups of readers and creators, when really those differences are often just statements of convenience. We are not too different from each other when it comes to appreciating good art.

You’ve experimented significantly with ideas of media and form from your graphic novel, ’The Arrival’ through to the ‘The Singing Bones’ with its use of sculpture?  How do you decide the form and media to use for different projects and how easy is it to garner the support of publishers?

I’ve been pretty lucky to have those opportunities, and to work with very adventurous editors and publishers. Occasionally it’s taken a bit of convincing when the medium doesn’t sound intuitively practical – sculpture for instance – but in each case I would do a few experiments to prove a point, a few complete pages of The Arrival or a few sculptures inspired by Grimm’s fairy tales. Largely to check for myself if they work, particularly because it’s a big commitment to make a book, and I have to fully believe in a style and technique before taking that on. I know when it works when it feels logical or intuitively right, when it does not feel like I’m forcing anything.

The analogy that comes to mind is a puppet; you start by pulling the strings, building and controlling, and if it then begins moving by itself you can cut those manipulative strings. The style and medium is working, movement and feeling flows through it naturally. Good editors can see that too, that is what they are skilled in understanding, sometimes even more so than an artist. Often those experiments don’t work, it feels like you are endlessly pulling strings, masking some falseness, and you start again with something else. The Arrival was very much like that, the final pencilled form is very different from an original, cartoony version, and before that a simplified sculptural version. It was very difficult, and I almost gave up on it, but glad that I kept experimenting until I found a relatively simple solution, albeit a very long one!

To celebrate the 2020 shortlists of the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals, we will be holding a Twitter Takeover on 14 June.  This will be an opportunity to engage and interact with judges and key personnel of the awards and to hear more from the shortlisted authors and illustrators.  The Youth Libraries Group are delighted to announce the provisional programme for the day which runs from 11am to 6pm.

11.00am to 12.00pm Reading around the World
An exploration of the importance of prizes in reading with Shaun Tan (TBC), Kate Greenaway shortlisted author and illustrator of Tales from the Inner City and a representative from the Children's Book Council of Australia, comparing their awards with ours.

12.00pm to 1.00pm Art, Expression and Adversity
Marcus Sedgwick and Julian Sedgwick will talk about their Carnegie shortlisted book Voyages of Orpheus Black in the Underworld and about collaboration.

1.00pm to 2.00pm Empathy and Illustration
Illustrator Poonam Mistry and author and illustrator Chris Naylor-Ballesteros talk about empathy in their Kate Greenaway shortlisted books, You're Snug with Me  and The Suitcase.

2.00pm to 3.00pm True North
Chris Mould (TBC) Kate Greenaway shortlisted illustrator of The Iron Man and Anthony McGowan author of Carnegie shortlisted Lark talk about their books set in the North.

3.00pm to 4.00pm Sea and Survival
Chris Vick Carnegie shortlisted author of Girl. Boy. Sea.  and Beth Waters, author and illustrator of Kate Greenaway shortlisted Child of St Kilda talk about their books and the role of the sea.

4.00pm to 5.00pm A Sense of Self
Authors Randy Ribay and Dean Atta talk about the role of identity in their Carnegie shortlisted books, Patron Saints of Nothing and The Black Flamingo.  Closes with announcement of YLG Awards Shortlist 2020!

5.00pm to 6.00pm Quiz
With CILIP Library Champion Bobby Seagull, via his YouTube Channel.

Please note participants in sessions may change.  Please keep your eyes peeled on Twitter from @YouthLibraries.

Make your voice and views part of the discussion #CKG20.

With nominations currently still open for the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals (nominate by clicking here), we talk with 2019 winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal, Jackie Morris about her work, the impact winning has had upon her and the extraordinary book that she and Robert MacFarlane created.

Kate Greenaway winner, ‘The Lost Words’ initially began as a chat with Emily Drabble about producing  a web slideshow of images to highlight words that had been dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.  The words had fallen from common use and so were no included in the dictionary whose purpose OUP described as being ‘to reflect language as it is used, rather than seeking to prescribe certain words or word usages.’

Recognising the importance of the natural world, several authors, naturalists and broadcasters signed a letter composed by Laurence Rose, conservationist and editor of the Natural Light blog.  The letter cited the National Trust’s ‘Natural Childhood’ campaign stating

‘Every child should have the right to connect with nature.  To go exploring, sploshing, climbing, and rolling in the outdoors, creating memories that’ll last a lifetime.’

Among those who signed the letter were Margaret Atwood, Nicola Davies, Robert MacFarlane, Michael Morpurgo, Sir Andrew Motion and Jackie Morris.  Talking about the removal of the words, Jackie says ‘it highlighted the disconnect between language and nature and was a clear indication that something was wrong.’

Fearing that a slideshow of images would be there and then, like the words in the dictionary, disappear, Jackie began to think about a book and decided to write to co-signatory, Robert MacFarlane to see whether he might be willing to pen an introduction.  When the reply came back a couple of weeks later, the suggestion was to collaborate on something more than just an introduction.

‘We started knocking the idea back and forth between the two of us.’  Jackie was clear that she didn’t want children to be in it and wanted it to be wild.  ‘The idea of spells clicked in his mind.  The first one he wrote was the kingfisher and I painted it against a background of goldleaf’.  Taking it to the Hamish Hamilton offices, was the first  time Jackie met with Robert and she didn’t meet him again until the project was finished.  ‘Everything was done via e-mail, I’d send sketches, he would send spells to be spoken aloud.  It was the most collaborative piece of work of all of the things I’ve done.’

Jackie did not create roughs for any of the illustrations, submitting the artwork in batches.  Part of the collaborative process involved the work of designer Alison O’Toole.  Jackie describes finding ‘The Lost Words’ font as having been key, ‘I was conscious about legibility, but something about the space given to the words means that reluctant readers aren’t intimidated.  We’ve had feedback about how well reluctant readers have responded and how they love it and are not put off by the complexity of language because of the relationship with the pictures.’

Hamish Hamilton were extremely trusting and have supported the crowd-funding ideas where copies of the book have been gifted to local .  The book has caught the public imagination in an inspiring way.  The dynamism of the relationship between written and pictorial language has acted as a catalyst enabling creative responses that have crossed a variety of artistic boundaries with folk songs, exhibitions and even a performance at the 2019 proms.   

Talking about this year’s Kate Greenaway win, Jackie explains the impact it has had upon her career.  ‘After twenty-eight years working in children’s books, I have a big backlist.  For the first time ever there is a plan of my work being taken to Frankfurt Book Fair.’  Her Canadian publisher was also very excited on hearing the news.  ‘My work now has a connection with other books that have won and which I love.  It has given me a new confidence.’

Fighting the cause of lost words is a familiar effort in Wales where language itself is endangered. While both Welsh and English by today have equal status in the eyes of the law, over the past 150 years, we have seen the number of Welsh speakers decline from 90% of the population to only 19%. During the past sixty years or so, there have been many campaigns for the survival of Welsh, or Cymraeg as it is known in her own language. As well as official status, these campaigns have led to the restoration of original Welsh place names (and marking them with bilingual road signs), the right to be educated in Welsh and to have Welsh television and radio programmes. And things are certainly looking up, with the Welsh government recently setting itself the ambitious goal to double the number of Welsh speakers from half a million to a million by the year 2050.

This matters. Saving words and languages matters. It matters because they are more than just sounds. They are windows that enable us to see and understand the world about us. A bluebell and a dandelion may both be flowers, but without being called by their own names, they become somehow less visible, less important, more prone to be ignored ...  and eventually, more likely to vanish.

This is one of the reasons why I was so delighted to be asked to try to recast Rob Macfarlane’s spells into Welsh and project them against Jackie Morris’ extraordinarily beautiful artwork. Inspired by the original ideas, I took a deep breath and imagined my pencil into a magic wand. Together we were facing a task of great responsibility - to conjure the words of the world about us back from the brink of unbeing and place them in central sight!

Some of the challenges were obvious. If the way the three letters in the English ‘ivy’ grow to five in the Welsh ‘iorwg’ cause a conundrum, then what about how the four in ‘newt’ expand to ten over three words in ‘madfall y dŵr’?! Beyond their length, the names also sometimes focus on different characteristics. While the Welsh ‘clychau’r gog’ and the English ‘bluebell’ reveal the same ‘bell’/’cloch’ component, ‘blue’ is not reflected in the Welsh, but instead it recalls the ‘cuckoo’ that shares its May landscape. And if the regal status of ‘kingfisher’ is not evident in Welsh, here the colour blue, that’s missing from the bell flowers, is clear for, literally translated, this royal English fisherman is known in Welsh as ‘the blue of the water’s edge’.

As is the case in other languages such as French or German, in Welsh we have two ways of expressing knowing, enabling us to ‘know’ facts on the one hand, and places and people on the other in different ways. In our language we recognise that to know facts is somehow a more superficial undertaking than to know places and people; the former an act of mind and memory, the latter more an act of the heart and soul.

In working on these spell-songs, I have been allowed to meet the twenty words they conjure up and get to know what they represent beyond the mind and memory. They have become more than facts. They have become friends that need to be known by the heart and soul.

With the help of the craftsmanship and artistry of the design team at Graffeg, and the generous encouragement of Jackie and Rob, it has been a great joy to work on Geiriau Diflanedig. I can only hope that the readers will share some of this pleasure and that the Welsh version will play its part, along with its counterparts in the other languages, in calling back onto our tongues some endangered species of wondrous words.

To help ensure a copy of Geiriau Diflanedig reaches every primary school in Wales please visit: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/geiriau-diflanedig-for-primary-schools-in-wales

Geiriau Diflanedig published on 10 October 2019

Grateful thanks to Mererid Hopwood for writing this guest blog.

The Youth Libraries Group annual conference is always a high point in the calendar, a chance to recharge creative energies and to connect with all manner of ideas and with individuals working in the field. Our theme this year is Reading the Future and aims to explore what it means to be a reader in the 21st Century, some of the opportunities and challenges that exist around this and the ways in which information, stories and imagination traverse different platforms and technologies.

Reading is a vital skill, an opportunity to find release from daily lives, to encounter and engage with news ways of thinking, to step into the past or to look forward into the future. Running beneath the conference’s main theme is a series of strands exploring key areas of interest. The capacity poetry holds for conveying feelings, emotion and acting as an access point for reading makes it a very worthwhile focal point. We are delighted to welcome CLiPPA winners Rachel Rooney and Joseph Coehlo as speakers as well as having the National Literacy Trust presenting research on the role reading poetry has on child literacy. 

With the 100 year anniversary of the Representation of the People Act, we’re looking at representation and rights for women in literature for young people. Our distinguished guests include Sally Nicholls, author of Things a Bright Girl Can Do, David Roberts, author and illustrator of Suffragette and many more. This melds with another key for the conference, Enid Blyton. 2018 marks 50 years since the writer, voted by the public as the UK’s best loved author, passed away. It feels an apt time to reconsider her literary legacy and uncanny ability to captivate contemporary readers. We will also have our first ever Midnight Feast in celebration of her work!

In another first, we will also be hosting the inaugural Robert Westall Memorial Lecture. This will be led by Dr Kim Reynolds from Newcastle University and Paula Wride from Seven Stories, the National Centre for the Children’s Book and will look at the indelible impact that twice winner of the Carnegie Medal Robert Westall’s work has made on the field. It feels massively exciting to be working with so many different agencies – BookTrust, Seven Stories, National Literacy Trust, Empathy Lab and more – to bring the latest research and findings and to enable networking opportunities that add value and increase reach.

it also feels apposite that this year’s conference is taking place in Manchester, one of the UK’s new UNESCO Cities of Literature and we’ll be holding a special dinner to celebrate the role of key children’s authors and illustrators from the city. The conference is uplifting, lively, vibrant and most of all inclusive. We look forward to welcoming public and school librarians alike, staff from school library services, people from the education sector and all with an interest in children’s books.

Do join us for what promises to be thought-provoking and enlivening conference and a chance to build change and critical mass around reading. To book your place please visit http://www.cilip.org.uk/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1059241&group=201316

We would love to know your best conference memory or the session you are most interested in attending!