Carnegie & Kate Greenaway Shortlists
Posted on Tuesday, March 19, 2019
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The eight-strong shortlists for the prestigious CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals have been announced. Thousands of schools around the country will now start to shadow the awards. The winners will be announced on Tuesday 18th June.
The two shortlists, for the Carnegie Medal for the best children's book and for the Kate Greenaway Medal illustration award, have been chosen by volunteer Youth Librarians from longlists of 20 books per Medal. Recognising a diverse range of voices and perspectives is a core mission of the Awards, and this year's shortlists comprise books by authors and illustrators from across the globe, offering multiple perspectives from suffragette to slam poet, tribesman to basketball player and settings as varied as Coney Island, the East End slums of 1920s London, an Indian forest and a remote mountain village in the Philippines. Female voices are strongly represented across both lists, with 11 of the 16 shortlisted books written or illustrated by women, and around half the books featuring female protagonists. The 2019 shortlists are as follows: CILIP Carnegie Medal longlist The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo (Electric Monkey) Rebound by Kwame Alexander, illustrated by Dawud Anyabwile (Andersen Press) The House with Chicken Legs by Sophie Anderson, illustrated by Elisa Paganelli (Usborne Books) Bone Talk by Candy Gourlay (David Fickling Books) A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge (Macmillan Children's Books) Things A Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls (Andersen Press) Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, illustrated by Chris Priestley (Faber & Faber) The Land of Neverendings by Kate Saunders (Faber & Faber) CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal longlist (alphabetical by illustrator surname): The Day War Came illustrated by Rebecca Cobb, written by Nicola Davies (Walker Books) Ocean Meets Sky, illustrated and written by Eric Fan and Terry Fan (Lincoln Children's Books) Beyond The Fence illustrated and written by Maria Gulemetova (Child's Play Library) The Wolf, the Duck and the Mouse illustrated by Jon Klassen, written by Mac Barnett (Walker Books) Julian is a Mermaid illustrated and written by Jessica Love (Walker Books) You're Safe With Me illustrated by Poonam Mistry, written by Chitra Soundar (Lantana Publishing) The Lost Words illustrated by Jackie Morris, written by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton) Suffragette: The Battle for Equality illustrated and written by David Roberts (Two Hoots) Three verse novels make the Carnegie shortlist for the first time in the Medal's 81-year history. Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X, Kwame Alexander's Rebound and Jason Reynold's Long Way Down each use free verse to create fresh and emotionally impactful coming-of-age stories, blending influences from slam poetry and hip-hop to explore identity, first love, loss and gang crime. One verse novel has previously won the Carnegie Medal: Sarah Crossan's One, in 2016. Jon Klassen is the only previous winner to appear on a 2019 Medal shortlist, having scooped the 2014 Kate Greenaway Medal with This Is Not My Hat. Former shortlistees to make it onto this year's lists are Frances Hardinge and Kate Saunders for the Carnegie Medal, and Rebecca Cobb, David Roberts and Jackie Morris for the Kate Greenaway Medal. There is a strong showing for independent publishers on the lists, with seven of the 16 titles coming from Andersen Press, Child's Play Library, David Fickling Books, Faber & Faber and Lantana Publishing. The two smallest presses Child's Play Library and Lantana Publishing have books on the Kate Greenaway shortlist for the first time. Now that the shortlists are public, over 4,500 reading groups in schools across the country will embark on the Medals' shadowing scheme, which sees children and young people reading and debating the shortlisted books between now and the winner announcement in June 2019. The Shadowers' Choice Award, voted for and awarded by the children and young people who shadow the Medals, will be announced alongside the two Medal winners. This new award has evolved out of CILIP's recent Diversity Review, which identified opportunities to empower and celebrate the young people involved in the Medals through the shadowing scheme by giving them a more significant voice and visible presence in the process and prize giving. Amnesty International UK continues to support the Medals in partnership with CILIP, providing educational resources and training to raise awareness and understanding of the power of children's books to explore human rights, encourage empathy and broaden horizons. Amnesty have produced human rights-based materials for all the shortlisted books to aid reflection and discussion in classrooms and libraries.
