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Prizes and Prizewinners
Keith Barker
Why award prizes? What importance is attached to them by writers, publishers, those
selecting books and, probably most importantly, children themselves? What part of our
personality desires perfection, discarding along the way the seemingly worthless? And in
these days of sponsorship, what do organisations which help to fund the administration
of an award and the glittering prizes themselves seek to gain from their involvement?
The awarding of prizes encapsulates many of the dilemmas of any adult-driven
enterprise which is intended to benefit young people and helps to focus discussion on
how far those who select reading material for children have to take into account the
needs and desires of young people while also satisfying the adult’s innate desire to
improve children’s tastes. Walter de la Mare’s often quoted dictum that only the best is
good enough for children would appear to be particularly applicable, despite the fact
that this is now seen as something of an elitist viewpoint. But who should decide what is
the best and what indeed that definition of best should be? Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl
have almost certainly been the best children’s writers to capture the child reader’s
attention and hold it; but would they be considered therefore in de la Mare’s ‘best’
theory? The debate around children’s reading habits has often circled around these very
dilemmas and any discussion of the awarding of prizes needs to take these factors into
account.
But what of the prizes themselves? The two oldest awards in the English speaking world
bear striking similarities. The oldest, the John Newbery Medal, named after the
publisher of A Little Pretty Pocket Book, which some see as the first work published
specifically for children, was first mooted at the 1921 conference of the American Library
Association. The publisher Frederick Melcher was highly impressed by the response to a
talk he gave to a group of children’s librarians:
As I looked down from the platform at the three or four hundred people, I thought of
the power they could have in encouraging the joy of reading among children. I
could see that I was sure of having the librarians’ cooperation in Children’s Book
Week, but I wanted to go further and secure their interest in the whole process of
creating books for children, producing them, and bringing them to the children.
Smith 1957:36This helped him very quickly (in fact, during the conference) to formulate the idea of
presenting an annual prize for a children’s book. It is interesting that he