David Maybury | Blog

I’m a little late with the run down of this week’s papers… just a little late. And there was news a-plenty; starting in the Times UK with the announcement of the Times/Chicken House Prize - including an interview with the winner, Sophie Bennett.

And in the run up to the announcement David Almond had this (and much more) to say:

Books are not a threatened species. They are ordinary features of the ordinary world. Kids read them, just as many (how many?) adults read them. They aren’t “good” for us in the way that medicine is. They don’t “help” in any specific ways. Feeding books to the bad lads won’t immediately civilise them and make them good. But they draw us together. They entertain us. They show us as we are - imperfect, partial, elusive, unfinished, beyond straightforward comprehension. They show us as we could be - more angelic, more satanic. They show us how our world could be - more like Heaven or more like Hell. Paradoxically, it’s in fiction’s weird mingling of facts and lies that we can approach the deepest and most complex “truths” about ourselves.

Elsewhere in the Times UK, Amanda Craig reviewed Michelle Magorian’s Just Henry and interviewed Jacqueline Wilson. It was a weekend of BIG interviews - the Guardian came up with their own - Nicholas Wroe spoke to Shirley Hughes

I’ve always loved film and theatre, and stories usually come to me visually, running like a movie in my head. The technical part of fitting them into a 32-page picture book is then the challenge. I think of the page as a sort of screen or stage, but there’s also a gutter which runs down the middle of a book. In the first Alfie story he locked himself inside the house and the gutter became a section-view of the door. It’s an old silent movie trick and the Marx brothers used it. You get two scenes, the anxious child one side and the anxious mother the other. They can’t see each other but the reader sees both sides. Perfect for the story and for the form of a picture book. And enormously satisfying.

Staying with the Guardian - Lucy Mangan continues building her perfect library with Astrid Lindgren’s The Six Bullerby Children.

But wait! There’s more - elsewhere comes the news that Patrick Ness is taking up the, very first ever!, online Writer In Residence for Booktrust. The Sunday Tribune recommends writing some books as a possible redundancy beater. And of course there was World Book Day - covered in the Irish Independent as well as the Very Hungry Caterpillar, Sarah Webb and Eoin Purcell’s Blogs.

And finally - I’m reserving final judgement until I get a chance to read the bewk - but the cover art for And Another Thing looks great!

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