The Carnegie and Greenaway Medals have for the first time been awarded to the same book, ‘A Monster Calls’. Nicolette Jones talks to its creators, the children’s writer Patrick Ness and illustrator Jim Kay, about how they brought the late Siobhan Dowd’s idea so successfully to life.
‘He nailed it’: Patrick Ness, right, with Jim Kay, whose dark illustrations, above, were created in a freezing Edinburgh flat Photo: Martin Pope
This year, for the first time ever, the same book, A Monster Calls, has won the CILIP Carnegie Medal for children’s literature and its companion prize for illustration, the Kate Greenaway Medal. It is an extraordinary outcome for a book with extraordinary beginnings. Its author, Patrick Ness, was passed the baton of an idea from a previous Carnegie Medal-winner, Siobhan Dowd, who died of breast cancer in 2008. (Dowd won the Medal posthumously for Bog Child.) Although Ness wrote a book that was very much his own, the spirit of Dowd was in the book, and in the illustrations by Jim Kay.
Also unusually, Ness has won the Carnegie Medal for the second year in a row; there is only one precedent in 75 years for winning twice two years in a row (achieved by Peter Dickinson in 1979 and 1980). Ness has had a charmed career full of awards. So much so that other children’s authors already tease him. “Philip Ardagh tweets me to say: ‘Won any prizes today?’” says Ness. All three books of his Chaos Walking trilogy, including last year’s winner, Monsters of Men, were shortlisted for the Medal. But even Ness did not dream of a double: “I never, ever expected it. I feel a little sheepish.”
Ness was, however, rooting for Jim Kay to win the Greenaway. “I think his work is so incredible. And it truly couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” says Ness in his soft American accent, when we all meet in his agent’s office in the West End. Ness, an old hand by now at interviews, is eloquent and assured but still boyish, at 40, with his number two haircut and mischievous smile. The son of an American drill sergeant, he grew up in Hawaii and Washington State, and is now a British national. Kay defers to Ness’s experience, but has an eager manner, and seems fascinated by everything around him: the statues he can see from the window, the photographer’s camera.
Full story at The Telegraph
Full story at The Telegraph
