We are delighted to welcome Bethany Walker to the blog for a special guest post about letters.  Bethany’s debut novel Chocolate Milk, X-Ray Specs and Me published with Scholastic this January and is a wonderfully witty and whimsical story told that will appeal to fans of Liz Pichon’s Tom Gates books and Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid titles.  The book is fantastically illustrated by Jack Noel.  Here Bethany talks with us about letter writing and includes some fascinating facts in this not-to-be-missed blog post.

I don’t think I’m creating any spoilers when I write that the main fun of Chocolate Milk, X-Ray Specs and Me is that Freddy Spicer, its main character, has NO IDEA what’s going on. In my spy story, Freddy’s parents are international secret agents but their cover story is that they’re sprout farmers - and sweet, naive Freddy believes it, even when all evidence around him points to the contrary. One of the key rules for children’s writing is: get rid of the adults. Sending Freddy’s parents off on some undercover mission was the ideal way to get rid of them and leave Freddy behind to get into plenty of trouble – but it also gave me the opportunity to write this book in a different way, with the story being told through the letters Freddy writes to his absent parents. By doing this, Freddy’s is the main voice of the book and his letters allow us to get to know him. The letters provide a personal insight into his hopes and fears but also, vitally, tell us what he does and doesn’t understand. Jack Noel’s excellent doodle illustrations also give a further dimension to Freddy’s letters too, almost making them real, tactile artefacts.

Even though (and I hope this doesn’t come as a shock to readers) I am not a ten-year-old boy, writing Freddy’s letters reminded me of how important a role letters played in my life – and made me sad for their continuing demise. Thinking back to my own childhood, so many key events were somehow related to letters, from the obligatory post-Christmas Thank You cards to the annual holiday postcards. Towards the end of primary school, I remember the ‘correspondence’ I had with a boy from the next village – our brothers, at secondary school, acted as postmen, and our letters passed back and forth for months. Unfortunately, when we started secondary school together the following year, our fervent letter writing was not matched by our ability to make conversation and that was that! It was also through letters that I heard about not getting into a certain university and how I applied for my first few jobs.

Of course, there are good reasons why letters have been superseded by other forms of communication, particularly email. However, I couldn’t have Freddy sending emails, or anything else modern and speedy, because the problems and dangers in the story would have been too quickly identified and solved by the adults. And even though Freddy’s letters don’t necessarily reach their intended recipients, I made sure it was not the fault of the postal service. I certainly didn’t want to poke fun at that, although it’s not hard to set up jokes about the postal service. It’s all about the delivery*! (*Sorry, that’s my favourite letter-based joke.)

Reading Freddy’s letters, and the other documents included in the book (newspaper cuttings, communication transcripts etc), the reader is put in the role of historian – using sources to work out what is actually going on. I studied History at university and as a historian, letters are basically the holy grail of primary sources. To get real information from a key historical figure’s hand is amazing; not only does it give you direct information about a situation, but it can also help build up your understanding of the person’s opinion of it – and, hopefully, give you an insight into their personality. Letters recorded the key moments in history, capturing moments of development and discovery. Some letters could even make history – for example, it was through finding letter-based evidence of Mary Queen of Scots’ involvement in a plot against Elizabeth I that Mary ended up being executed. Conversely, even though Elizabeth was suspected of plotting against her half-sister several years before, no written evidence was ever found and so Elizabeth survived to go on to be monarch.

Though generally written on flimsy pieces of paper, some letters can be incredibly valuable. The most expensive letter ever sold at auction was a beautiful piece of calligraphy written by a legendary Chinese scholar to a friend in 1080. The staggering age of this letter was equalled by the staggering $30 million it was bought for. Second to that is the $5.3 million spent on the letter Francis Crick wrote to his son, Michael, in 1953, regarding his discovery of the double helix of DNA, arguably one of the greatest discoveries of the last century. The letter is the first record of the discovery and includes a sketch of the DNA model, but the fact that it was written by a father to his son means that it is not some incomprehensible piece of peer-to-peer scientific terminology. By being written in a language a child could understand, it is made all the more valuable.

While most letters will never reach the value of those cited above, all letters have a value in that everyone appreciates receiving a thoughtful note. Over lockdown, feel-good stories have come out over new letter-based friendships that have been developing, such as the six-year-old girl becoming pen-pal to a 94-year-old care home resident, or the woman who discovered a child’s fairy garden and started writing little notes as the resident fairy for the child to discover. Out of everyone I have known, my mum was the most fervent letter writer and, when I left home, not a week went by without receiving some kind of lovely missive from her. She died seven years ago and I still miss her letters landing on my doormat – but, occasionally, I find an old one she sent me, in her illegible scrawl, and it makes me happy.

Chocolate Milk, X-Ray Specs & Me by Bethany Walker and Jack Noel is out now, published by Scholastic.

We are pleased to welcome C G Moore to the blog to talk about his new verse novel Gut Feelings.  The book is based upon his own experiences with familial adenomatous polyposis and is told in verse and has special visual designs by Becky Chilcott.  The book is published by UCLan Publishing.

Authors often find their second novel quite challenging, did you experience this?

It was almost the contrary.  I found it quite easy to write.  What was difficult was knowing what form to tell the story in.  Once that was figured out, it flowed very naturally.  I have a lot of stories inside my head and this one felt very personal because it is my own story.  I felt it translated well in free-verse.

What was it about free verse which felt to fit the project?

I’ve always struggled to communicate my illness because it affects very few people in the world.  On average only 1 in 50,000 people have familial adenomatous polyposis.  Outside my family, I’ve never met anyone else with it.  When I have to explain this to friends or lovers, there are many aspects to communicate.  There is the science of the condition, the psychological impact on me and also how it can affects me as a gay man.  In order to communicate this succinctly, I wanted to pack as much feeling into it as possible.  The only medium that allowed this was verse.  I wanted to strip back everything that was unnecessary and create layers of meaning within each individual poem, but also in the ways these linked and created the story arc.

Why did representing chronic illness fell important to you?

When you’ve got chronic illness and it is invisible, it can be very difficult for people to see there is anything wrong, or to recognise this.  If it affects your bowel or is urinary, people don’t always see or understand that.  Representation in books for young people is important in helping to build more empathetic readers leading to more understanding and compassion.  I hope people might have a better understanding of how chronic illness can impact on people’s day to day lives.  I wanted people to understand what my mum, my grandad and I went through.

How experimental did you feel you could be with the poems?

I felt like I had a blank canvas in terms of free verse, but not in terms of poetry.  There were some poems that were in there that I liked, but which didn’t really fit with the other poems.  An early poem was a sestina.  I wanted to make the poetry accessible.  There is an evolution in the way that the poems are told from my younger self to the point at which I’m at now.  There’s a progression of form, of ideas and content. 

Becky Chilcott has done a fantastic job on designing the book, can you tell us a little about this please?

As I was writing each poem, I had ideas in mind as to how some wanted to be ‘form’ or ‘shape’ poems.  I wanted some to reflect the theme or subject.  I worked with my editor to look at ways that we could be experimental.  Initially we thought this would be using the letters from an individual word to create images relating to the poems.  Becky Chilcott the designer was given a lot of creative control, we wanted to give as much free reign so that the design gave additional meaning through the visuals which hopefully will draw new readers in.

Can you tell us what you are working on now?

Although I haven’t experienced second book syndrome, I feel a little like I now have third book syndrome!  During the pandemic, trying to balance work, publicity for my books and freelance projects has meant it has been hard to find time and space to write.  The third book is set in the Bible Belt in America in a little town in Texas.  I don’t think I can say any more than that it until I’ve submitted it to my publisher!


Good luck to C G Moore and thank you for the interview.

We are delighted and extremely excited to welcome Shirley Hughes to the blog.  Shirley was the winner of the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for Dogger.  This also won the Greenaway of Greenaways during the award’s anniversary celebrations.  To celebrate the publication of the book’s sequel Dogger’s Christmas, we were delighted to have the opportunity to interview Shirley Hughes.

As well as being a hugely talented, multi-award winning author-illustrator, Shirley is also a great friend and champion of libraries.  She was selected as a guest editor for BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour and specifically asked for one of the topics during her show to be ‘Libraries’.  2020 marks the 60^th anniversary of Shirley Hughes’ first published book, Lucy and Tom’s Day.  To escape into or just enjoy a different one of Shirley’s remarkable books, follow her on Twitter @ShirleyHughes_

Please can you tell us how you first began working in illustration?

Aged 17 I studied fashion and dress design at Liverpool Art School, my favourite part of the course was fashion drawing. After just over a year I moved on to the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford. There was no design or illustration tuition at the Ruskin, a tutor called Jack Townend taught lithography. It was he who suggested I might like to try some book illustration. In my final year in Oxford I concentrated on graphic work, using pen and ink, watercolour and gouache. I made a tiny amount of cash drawing adverts of ladies’ underwear for a department store on the High Street. Meanwhile I took my first job hand colouring line illustrations in an edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As I graduated Barnet Freedman, a revered illustrator, tutor, war artist and commercial artist, told me he’d consider introducing me to some publishers in London if I was serious about trying to make my way as an illustrator. This he kindly did. My first commission for a book came with a story by Olivia Fitz Roy, The Hill War and this gradually led to more work until in 1960 my first picture book was published, Lucy and Tom’s Day (Victor Gollancz).

There’s a deceptive simplicity in the way your work ‘shows’ stories unfolding and character’s emotions and motivations progressing.  In your view, what makes for a successful way of showing a story through illustration?

The text must leave space for the illustrations in two ways; firstly, physical space so that you consider where the text will be placed as you create your illustrations, but then also more loosely. The words can convey one story, whilst the drawings show something slightly different. You want to give the reader and the child things to talk about, so the child can be spotting something the illustrations reveal but the text doesn’t, that way the child is ahead of the adult.

Dogger won the Kate Greenaway Medal and in 2007 went on to be voted as the Greenaway of Greenaways by the public, what kind of impact did this recognition have on your career?

Winning the Kate Greenaway Medal for Dogger meant so very much to me. To have my work recognised by esteemed librarians was quite something. So many distinguished illustrators, whose work I so admire, had won the medal before me. The award almost coincided with my entry into the USA, and Dogger’s ongoing success led to more of my books being published there and internationally. I will never know if the Medal had any sway over the American publisher, I am pretty sure it did. It gave me such a fillip; it was a boost to my creativity and gave me a true incentive to keep going.

To be voted the Greenaway of Greenaways was an enormous honour, and I am very grateful to all those who have shared the story at home, in schools and in libraries and who came out to vote for me and Dogger. It's hugely rewarding to have created books that receive the ultimate recognition like this. Thank you.

As well as creating your own books, you’ve collaborated with some incredible names in children’s literature, Noel Streatfeild, Dorothy Edwards, Margaret Mahy… what would you say are the differences between illustrating another’s person’s text and your own and do you have a preference?

I sometimes think of my time spent illustrating authors’ work as an apprenticeship. Often I’d be asked to create a cover and say twenty line drawings. This kind of apprenticeship is so hard to come by nowadays for emerging illustrators. When it comes to visual characterisation an illustrator is best left to their own imagination, with the less interjections from the author the better really once you get going. The sparser the text the more my imagination reins free. It is slightly uncanny when you find out later that you have drawn somebody who looks like the author, or one of their relatives…

When I look back I think my biggest break of all came from working with Dorothy Edwards. I was very familiar with her My Naughty Little Sister stories; I’d read them bedtime after bedtime to my own children. However tired I was, Dorothy’s books were always a pleasure to read.  Dorothy’s first collections of stories were originally illustrated by three different artists. In 1968 I was commissioned by Methuen to illustrate When My Naughty Little Sister Was Good, and Dorothy was so pleased with how they looked that she asked that I re-illustrate all of her stories.  When the two of us finally met there was an immediate rapport. She told me numerous tales of her own childhood. She, of course, was the Naughty Little Sister. I learned a very great deal from Dorothy, not least how to address and entertain a young audience.

I had almost no contact with Margaret Mahy. I was in London and she was in New Zealand. But vivid pictures flow from her descriptions and every sentence she wrote.

I was fortunate to be asked to work with Noel Streatfeild, then at the height of her powers. She had spotted one of my illustrations, and asked her publisher Collins, if I might work on her new book The Bell Family.

It was such fun to work with my daughter, the author illustrator Clara Vulliamy, for our Dixie O’Day series. We dreamt up the stories about two chums Dixie and Percy and their adventures behind the wheel. For the first time in my life I handed over the reins for the illustrations and Clara did the drawings, with me writing the stories. With Dixie O'Day I was especially thinking about the emergent reader who enjoyed picture books but was moving into the challenge of longer text, and needs a lot of inspiration from illustrations to carry them along.

The return to Dave, Dogger and family feels so natural and seamless.  The book is an absolute classic, how did it feel to be returning to these characters and were there any challenges given how well loved Dogger is?

I’d been wanting to do another Christmas story, but it took a while for the right idea to form in my head. I thought and thought, and mulled and mulled, and then Dogger’s Christmas took flight. The simplicity of a picture book is misleading: they can take a long time to come together. The real Dogger is so vivid in my imagination I could draw him in my sleep now. It has been like meeting up again with a very old friend.

You’ve worked across so many different age-groups (from nursery upwards) and across a huge variety of forms – picture books, short stories, poetry, graphic novels.  Do you have a preferred age-group or form and do you consciously seek to challenge yourself?

My favourite audience has to be the child on the cusp of or just embarked upon school, who’s just beginning to get excited about books.

Through my career I feel I have taken on several challenges. I took on a new one in Enchantment in the Garden. I wanted to create a longer story, which might appeal to boys as well as girls, but wanted to combine text, line drawing and colour art work. I used a panel to the side of the page for the text which then left me plenty of space to explore with my colour illustrations. I used this format again with The Lion and the Unicorn, and Ella’s Big Chance. I suppose with these books I was recalling those illustrators like Heath Robinson and Arthur Rackham, whose gift books I had so enjoyed in my own childhood. I turned to longer fiction, firstly with Hero on a Bicycle and then Whistling in the Dark, following my husband’s death. I wrote at the weekends and filled my time with those longer stories whilst I worked on my colour books in the week.

On the subject of challenge, you won a second Kate Greenaway medal with Ella’s Big Chance a jazz inspired reimagining of Cinderella, how much research was involved with creating such an immersive period piece?

I wanted to set the book, with all of its dancing scenes, ballrooms and splendour, in the 1920s when dancing was coming into vogue, with dancers shimmying about, with the quick step, the two step, the Charleston. I learned so much about how fabric drapes, how it covers and moves with the figure from my time at Liverpool Art School. We studied the history of costume there too, so useful when it came to illustrating my fairy tale retelling Ella’s Big Chance. The dresses are all my designs, inspired by the great French couturiers of the 1920s such as Doucet, Poiret and Patou; and the ballroom scenes inspired by the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies.

Please can you talk us through your approach to creating a book?

I draw out my books first in rough, taking the story from double-page spread to spread. One of the toughest challenges is then to translate the vitality of the rough, which is done at great speed with a B pencil, into the finished artwork, which, of course is done at a much slower and more meticulous pace. There is nothing more exciting than starting work; sharpening pencils and squeezing out my paints on to the palette. I use gouache colour, which is water-based but has a lot more body than watercolour, so you can cover up mistakes. I begin with Vandyke Brown, getting the details in place and the figures established – paying particular attention to gestures and expressions, which carry so much of the story – before adding local colour. I sometimes use oil pastels too, especially for landscapes and skies where I can be more free and impressionistic.

Which books and artists do you admire and how have these influenced your work?

I feel I have learned from so many greats to have gone before me. If I had to choose just one, it would be Edward Ardizzone. An author, illustrator and distinguished war artist, remarkably he was almost entirely self-taught. His figures, so touching in back view, are instantly recognisable. He had a perfect sense of tone, and with a few scratched lines could tell you exactly what he wanted you to see.

Thinking of contemporary artists, I greatly admire Posy Simmonds for her humour and her line work, Raymond Briggs who is a simply wonderful artist, Anthony Browne and Chris Riddell for his political cartoons.

Family is hugely important in your books, what do your own think of your work and do they have any particular favourites among your books?

My own family are my most loyal readers – it’s very important to me to have their good opinion of my books. Ed is drawn to my longer stories, such as Enchantment in the Garden and The Lion and the Unicorn. Tom has a soft spot for The Nursery Collection, published by Walker Books (Bathwater’s Hot, Colours, Noisy among others), as they remind him of when his own children were small. Clara, because she is an author illustrator too, always says that her favourite is the one on my drawing board at any given time – I show her my works in progress and we bounce ideas around, which is a huge pleasure.

Shirley Hughes, November 2020.


A huge thank you to Shirley Hughes for her generosity in sharing so much of her time and expertise with this interview and to Clare Hall-Craggs for the opportunity.

We are delighted to welcome Cliff McNish to the blog for a special interview to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of The Doomspell.  A special limited edition hardback of the book together with an exciting new novella The Light of Armath is available now.  To find out more and read an extract from this, why not visit Cliff's website.

Please can you tell us a little about yourself?

I started off not being a reader at all. We had precious few books at home, and no children’s ones that I recall. I read comics until my English teacher in late junior school finally thrust C.S. Lewis’s Narnian tale The Magician’s Nephew at me. I often wonder if the fact that the first novel to grip me was middle-grade magical fantasy is the reason I automatically took up writing in that vein once I began. I suspect so. But oddly I never started writing until I was 38 years old, and even then only because I’d recklessly promised my nine year-old daughter a story about a witch – recklessly because I’d never written any fiction before, so I had no idea how if I could do it or not. That story, originally called Rachel and the Witch, finally became The Doomspell.   

‘The Doomspell Trilogy’ is celebrating its 20^th anniversary, congratulations.  Can you introduce our readers to Rachel and Eric and the adventures they face.

Doomspell is slap-bang in the venerable tradition of wizards and witches, full of spells, counter spells and High Magic, with battles and stakes escalating as the children  try to stop an immensely powerful Witch from getting what she wants.

Rachel is the main character, intensely magical; her brother Eric has entirely different and unique skills. But in many ways the Witch, Dragwena, is the character many children remember best. She’s very much the sizzling White Witch of Narnia with zesty added snake-bite. A Japanese reader once sent me a fan letter saying, “My favourite character is Dragwena. Not only do I look like Dragwena [she has four jaws and spiders that live inside her], but psychologically I am like her, too.” You can’t always think of something to reply when you get letters like that.

You’ve written a new novella, ‘The Light of Armath,’ what parts of returning to the world felt easiest and most challenging?

In all honesty I thought I would struggle to be enthused writing about characters I’d created and left behind so long ago. In fact, the opposite occurred: the moment I started describing Dragwena in her eye-tower again, stroking her snake, irritated and restless, her entire character came back to me in all its full-blooded glorious villainy. I actually found I couldn’t wait to write about her again, as if she’d been sitting there expecting me to all this time, tapping a wand impatiently. Dragwena is the sort of relentless character it’s always a joy to work on. But in addition to her, I also wanted to do justice to a much-loved character from the original series, Morpeth. I felt I rather short-changed my readers by largely side-lining him in the in third book of The Doomspell Trilogy, and wanted to rectify that in The Light of Armath.

What can readers expect in ‘The Light of Armarth’?

First, I hope, an honest story. Readers who enjoyed this series have a lot of fondness for the memories, and it would have been horrible to sour that with a  sub-standard tale. So I decided I wouldn’t inflict it on them unless I thought it was good enough (I’m talking about for Doomspell fans here, of course. The new novella could conceivably be read stand-alone without knowing the first Doomspell book, but I wouldn’t recommend it, several aspects will be deeply confusing.).

Second good point, I hope, is that it’s not a little dinky nothing of a short story. It’s a proper novella, so it has some significant development. The last thing I wanted to do was bring out a 20^th Anniversary issue with a thin story, plopped in the book as an excuse to re-release it.

Third, I guess, is that the central spell in The Light of Armath is one Doomspell readers won’t have come across before, so that’s giving them something new as well.

Fourth, it answers a couple of questions left hanging around in the original book.

And fifth, I suppose, I’ve written it very much in the style of the original book as well, so if you like THE DOOMSPELL I’m guessing or supposing and hoping you’ll like this, too.

Oh and sixth – it’s in the original cover, and in a limited edition, for any collectors who may be interested in that.

Seventh – there is no seventh. (Which sounds like the starting idea for a new story, doesn’t it? ‘You may only perform six spells,’said the arch-mage. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because the seventh spell unravels the world.’ ‘Ah,’ I said, immediately and secretly looking forward to that moment ...)

Voice feels a tremendous strength in your writing, how do you go about establishing this?

I don’t actually work on this consciously. What I try to do is create main characters that embody strong traits, and hook those characters into stories that seem worth telling. To some extent you, the author, describing things, are the key voice holding everything together, of course, but I think the real key is creating characters that want something desperately. If you do that, readers also start to passionately identify with or against them, and plots automatically head in interesting directions. I teach in schools a lot (usually invited by librarians!), and a couple of my main workshops focus on creating great characters and the steps needed to build a strong plot around them. If anyone would like my action worksheets on these worksheets simply ask, and I’ll send you them.   

You’ve also written some highly successful Young Adult fiction including Breathe and Angel.  How does your approach differ writing for Young Adults?

That’s an interesting question. And there really are some major differences. Language complexity and plot and character complexity, obviously, are greater in a teen novel – or should be! And romance is really not appropriate to mid-grade, though deep friendship is (even if you subvert that romance in teen stories, which I sometimes do).

The level of psychological tension you can sustain is also altogether greater in teen fiction, as well as the level of critical self-examination, guilt, motive-checking, angst etc. so if you want to explore those things you swim towards teen fiction.

Another massive difference is who your enemy tends to be.  In mid-grade fiction the main opponents/antagonists tend to be external (eg Matilda by Roald Dahl, it’s not Matilda unable to come to terms with her crummy family, its Miss Trunchbull in all her magnificent excess), and it’s lovely to be able as a writer to focus on those external foes, keep the main children fundamentally good and supportive of each other and not constantly questioning their motivations. With teen fiction motives become murkier, the monster is often the one within, which of course is exactly what leads to opportunities for fully-rounded character development not usually so necessary in mid-grade.    

Breathe has won numerous awards and selected as one of the UK Schools Library Network 100 best adult and children’s novels, what do you think makes it so popular?

I honestly don’t know. First, perhaps because there are simply not that decent ghost novels for late juniors/early-mid teens out there, even now, so it fulfils a need (because who doesn’t like a good scary ghost story?)

But perhaps there are, if I can conjecture,  a couple of other aspects: 1) the ghost mother at the centre of the plot is truly a lost soul who is utterly convinced she is acting out of love. That whole theme of love and death/love verses hatred in the novel has a resonance that seems to appeal equally to children, teens and adults. A lot of children’s ghost novels tend to skirt the surface of some of this meaty thematic stuff, but Breathe doesn’t. 2) Maybe my creation of the realm of the Nightmare Passage also has something to do with it, too. It’s a place in the novel readers tend to remember. The Nightmare Passage only occupies a small part of the novel, actually, but readers have often written to me about it or mentioned it. 

Can you tell us a bit about the film script you created for this?

OMG don’t get me stated on this! First, I decided to learn to write a script with formal correctness using the standard software package, which is called Final Draft. I did that purely as an experiment to learn the medium, with a view to creating entirely new film and tv scripts. Then a major film production company based in L.A. contacted me, showing an interest in the rights for BREATHE. That led to me mentioning  the script I’d written, them saying great, show us it, and then working and reworking it many times under their guidance. In the end I worked on endless drafts, but could never get them to settle on the story. It was incredibly frustrating, and put me off film scriptwriting almost for good! But I still have my final script, which I like – and it’s very different from the novel. It’s now an adult ghost story, where the central characters are two women, one alive, one dead, battling over possession of the same son. I think it has as much zest as the original children’s novel, but who can really know? It’s sitting, as they say, in my desk drawer.  Like a lot of things you write, it might never get an audience. Maybe I’ll post it up for people to see one day ...

What can we expect next from you?

Writing The Light of Armath gave me a new lease of life where magical fantasy is concerned. I’d had a synopsis for a new mid-grade magical fantasy in my desk for years, basically untouched and unworked on while I concentrated on (mostly) teen age fiction projects, and also some adult horror. After finishing The Light of Armath I dusted the synopsis down, tested it on my daughter (she still reads my stuff!)  and realised I liked it. Well, I’d always liked he central idea of a world (our world) with magic emerging in various extraordinary ways, but now I felt I could write it. That it would be fun to do, in other words. So I’m penning it. I guess I’ll have EARTHSPELL out to beta readers within the next six months. Either that or it’ll turn into  total pap in front of me and get quietly shelved. Watch this space!   

As followers and friends of the Little Rebels Awards, the Youth Libraries Group is delighted to feature a celebratory blog on the day of its announcement!  Running for 8 years, the Little Rebels Award is designed to recognise the rich tradition of radical publishing for children aged between 0 and 12 in the UK.  The award is given by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers and was established in conjunction with Letterbox Librarywho now jointly administer it with founder member of the Alliance or Radical Booksellers, Housmans Bookshop.

Seven titles make up the strong and wide-ranging 2020 shortlist.  Videos comprising an introduction and information about each title presented by the authors and some illustrators of the shortlisted titles can be found on the National Shelf Service.  The stellar shortlist this year is as follows…

Sofia Valdez                                                 Future Prez

Tracey Corderory, ill Tony Neal                Sneaky Beak

Gill Lewis                                                       The Closest Thing to Flying

Jane Porter, ill Maisie Paradise                  The Boy who Loved Everyone

Smriti Halls, ill Robert Starling                   The Little Island

Bali Rai                                                           Now or Never: A Dunkirk story

Phoebe Swan                                               King Leonard’s Teddy

At a special virtual ceremony hosted by Patrice Lawrence, the winner of the 2020 award was announced.  The winner is The Boy who Loved Everyone by Jane Porter and Maisie Paradise Shearring.  Subtle and understated it is a powerful picture book about love, friendship and the ways in which these can be shown.  Judge, author and educator, Shaun Dellenty said, ‘In these challenging and divisive times, the most radical act of all I surely to love; The Boy who Loved Everyone brims joyfully with it.’

Head of Children’s Book Promotion for BookTrust, Emily Drabble described the book as ‘A deceptively deeply radical book on expressing love.’  While author and critic Darren Chetty praised ‘the story’s sincerity, and its willingness to embrace uncertainty.’

It is hard to imagine a time when the unifying qualities of love and compassion have been more important.  Massive congratulations to Jane Porter and Maisie Paradise on winning this year’s award and to all of the 2020 shortlist which arouse curiosity and change the ways in which young readers see and think about the world in which they live.