Subconscious Serendipity – Making Connections
I’ve recently finished reading Katy Hessel’s fascinating new book The Story of Art without Men. There have been other books exploring the absence of women in written histories of art and she refers to some of them, particularly the work of Linda Nochlin. I can remember my own gradual realisation of the hidden herstory of women…
The 2022 Hans Christian Andersen Awards shortlists – some personal reflections
The winners of the 2022 Hans Christian Andersen Awards will be announced on Monday 21st March at the IBBY press conference at the Bologna children’s book fair. The full list of nominees can be found here https://www.ibby.org/awards-activities/awards/hans-christian-andersen-award/hans-christian-andersen-awards-2022 and there is information about all of them in the vol 59, no. 4 issue of Bookbird, a fascinating survey of…
Fascination with Frankenstein
A recent piece in the New York Times caused a flurry on Twitter because it included the sentence ‘With Jules Verne and the publisher Hugo Gernsback, he invented the genre of science fiction’. The ‘he’ in question was H.G. Wells and the piece was a review of a new biography The Young H.G. Wells. Changing the…
Travel Books for Children
While writing an article about Robert Leeson (just published in IBBYLink https://www.ibby.org.uk/ibbylink/ ) I was prompted to look more closely at the oeuvre of another left wing author – Geoffrey Trease – and was interested to discover that he wrote some of the books in the Young Traveller series that were published from the late 1940s to the…
Who’s in a name?
I recently saw a reference to Joseph Lancaster and remembered that there used to be a Southwark primary school named after him. I realised that I did not know who he was although I was aware that the school no longer exists as, in an amalgamation with Geoffrey Chaucer secondary school, it was subsumed into…
Jacqueline Woodson – why are her books not available to children in the UK?
Last year I wrote a blogpost for the IBBY UK website https://www.ibby.org.uk/jacqueline-woodson/ expressing astonishment that children’s books by African American author Jacqueline Woodson are not published in the UK. She had just won the Hans Christian Andersen Author Medal and had previously received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award – the two most prestigious international awards for children’s…
Message in a plastic bottle
Concern about the environment and climate change has resulted in a burgeoning of children’s books relating to these. Are they all worth the paper they’re printed on? Many focus on individual responsibility and what can be done at a local level – clean up the beach; reduce, reuse, recycle etc but don’t necessarily tackle the…
First post
Welcome to my blog in which I’ll mainly be exploring my slan(n)t on aspects of children’s books, making links between them and other things that interest me including history, politics, cultural diversity, the environment, film, feminism. I may go off at a tan(n)gent about other things too! After around 40 years working as a librarian…
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