Thomson 1985:24Indeed, the winners of this award and similar British ‘children’s choice’ awards are not
that different from those of the established awards. The Guardian Award was
established in 1966 as a direct reaction to the traditional winners of the Carnegie Medal.
John Rowe Townsend, then the newspaper’s literary editor, has said:
We had a feeling that an award which was made and administered by a particular
body of people might tend to go to the same kind of book. In the three years before
we decided to start our award, the Carnegie, as it happened, had been awarded to
three successive sound, elegantly written, beautifully produced, Oxford novels, and
we wondered, perhaps, if a different perspective might conceivably produce a
different kind of winner.
Townsend 1978:14Just over ten years later, however, he was admitting: ‘there has been rather more
overlap between the Guardian and the Carnegie than I expected. Our winners and
runners-up have frequently been winners or runners-up for the Carnegie as well’ (14).
Similarly, The Other Award was established for non-biased books of literary merit in
1975, a year in which, as Rosemary Stones, the award’s originator, observed, ‘Mollie
Hunter, a fine children’s writer, was awarded the Carnegie Medal for a book that was
nowhere near her best; nor was it the best piece of writing published for children that
year’ (Stones 1978:182). That award was set up for a precise purpose, as indeed is the
clumsily named A Book Can Develop Empathy Award (formerly the Kind Writers Make
Kind Readers Award) designed to promote empathy for animals. The Other Award was
established to honour writing which was intended to counteract the ‘isms’ in children’s
books (which were a topic of great debate in the 1970s and 1980s) and to highlight
those books which attempt to portray positive images of minorities. It selected a list of
four or five titles, none promoted above the others, honoured writers like Farrukh
Dhondy and Bernard Ashley, announced its decisions in an intelligent manner (unlike
the bland praise at so many awards ceremonies) and was then terminated in 1988 ‘not
because all the “other” battles have been won but because it’s time to think of new and
imaginative ways of winning them’ (Stones 1988:22).
Other awards that try to highlight excellence in what is often a didactic type of literature
include the Children’s Peace Literature Award which is sponsored by the Psychologists
for the prevention of war, a specialist group of the Australian Psychological Society.
America also has several such awards, probably the most famous of which is the Coretta
Scott King Award inaugurated in 1969. One English commentator has praised the
presentation of this award:
You do not have to be at this occasion long to sense that there is more at issue here
than the celebration of good books. Librarians, who began and maintain it, writers,
artists, publishers and sponsors are connected, in the act of making and
celebrating this award, to a rich and complex strand of American life. For ‘people of504 PRIZES AND PRIZEWINNERS