Our most venerable children's literary prize should not become dominated by books aimed at teenagers
Kevin Brooks, the winner of this year's Carnegie Prize for 'The Bunker Diary' Photo: Geoff Pugh/The Telegraph
The Telegraph - 28 July 2014
When I wrote a piece in the Telegraph last month questioning the award of the CILIP Carnegie Medal to Kevin Brooks’s novel The Bunker Diary – a nihilistic literary experiment of dubious merit – I was taken aback by the storm that followed. It’s rare, it seems, for commentators on children’s books to rock the boat.
The debate in the week of the prize focused on the novel itself, and its part in a broader youth culture in which violence and perversion, whether in computer games, online pornography or the books that became HBO’s Game of Thrones, seem to be moving into the mainstream. The question of how to monitor what teenagers are watching or reading, so we as parents can act as a moral compass, is one of the key challenges in the internet age.
But just as important in all of this is the debate about the Carnegie Medal itself, a discussion that has been rumbling on in the publishing world for the past few weeks, and featured prominently in a recent issue of the industry magazine The Bookseller. The question is whether our oldest and most highly regarded children’s prize, traditionally the champion of books for ages eight to 12, should be allowing books for teenagers to dominate
More
More