Congratulations to Sarah Garland, whose wonderful graphic novel for young readers, and our current Book of the Month, Azzi In Between was announced as the winner of the 2013 Little Rebels Children’s Book Award on Saturday at the first London Radical Bookfair.

From the official press release:

Commenting on today’s announcement, guest judge and children’s author Elizabeth Laird said, “Azzi tells a simple and powerful story, one with which we should all be tragically familiar, with a text and pictures that are rich, appealing and satisfyingly detailed”. Booktrust founder and guest judge Wendy Cooling added, “The graphic novel style gives it freshness and immediacy. The text and illustration work together brilliantly as they invite children to enjoy the story and to think about the lives of other children”.

In a marked departure for the author, best known for her warm narratives of family life, Azzi In Between is in a graphic format and tells the powerful story of a family forced to flee their homeland and settle in a strange and unfamiliar country. The book is based on the author’s own experience of working among refugee families and is endorsed by Amnesty International. Kate Kellaway of The Observer described Azzi In Between as a “masterpiece”. Fen Coles, director of Letterbox Library who administered the award, said, “At a time when there are so many damaging myths circulating about refugees and asylum seekers, it is heartening to see a book which tells the truth- and in a way which children can relate to”.

Earlier in the day, Wendy Cooling chaired a discussion on ‘progressive children’s writing’ with two of the shortlisted authors, Sarah Garland and Jeanne Willis. Elizabeth Laird described Willis’ shortlisted book, Wild Child (Walker) as “a truly radical work, celebrating freedom and originality on every page”. The two other shortlisted titles were John Boyne’s The Terrible Thing that Happened to Barnaby Brocket (Corgi Children/Random House UK) and Yokococo’s Hans and Matilda (Templar Publishing).

The Little Rebels Children’s Book Award is a new award given by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers and administered by specialist children’s booksellers, Letterbox Library. The award recognises children’s fiction for readers aged 0-12 which promote social justice and is the brainchild of Nik Gorecki, Housmans Bookshop; speaking about the award, Nik said, “The Alliance of Radical Booksellers is working hard to promote radical publishing and children’s books are an important element of that. There’s still lots of plans in the pipeline for the future and next year we hope to introduce a category for teen readers”.

Here’s a photograph of Sarah talking about Azzi In Between during the panel discussion on Saturday, taken by www.ivereadthat.com – you can see all their photos from the day here – I wish I could have been there! (I know that Zoe from Playing by the Book was, and I will add a link to her post as soon as it goes live…) And also, below, is the great Little Rebels cartoon created by Guardian cartoonist Ros Asquith: a print will be given to each year’s winner as part of their prize.

Since my last update on this year’s PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge, we have added some great books to our list.

Together, we have read two new autobiographical picture books: Allen Say’s Drawing from Memory (Scholastic, 2011) and Ed Young’s The House Baba Built (Little, Brown and Company, 2011) – both wonderful, and I’m not going to say much more about them here as we will be featuring both of them more fully on PaperTigers soon. Those are our reading-together non-fiction books for the Challenge.

As our local book, we tried reading a book of folk tales from the North York Moors, where we live in the UK, but discovered the stories formed part of a tourist guide, including instructions for getting around… we extracted what we could but it wasn’t a very satisfactory read. It has made us not take beautifully illustrated and retold folk tales for granted!

Older Brother has read Rainbow World: Poems from Many Cultures edited by Bashabi Fraser and Debjani Chatterjee , and illustrated by Kelly Waldek (Hodder Children’s Books, 2003).  He dipped in and out of it through the summer break and we had to renew it from the library several times…

Older Brother has also been totally captivated by A Thousand Cranes: Origami Projects for Peace and Happiness. After reading the story of Sadako for the Reading Challenge way back in its first year, he’s wanted to know how to make the cranes but I have two left hands when it comes to origami – or at least I thought I did, until I received a review copy of A Thousand Cranes from Stone Bridge Press.  Recently revised and expanded from the original book by renowned origami expert Florence Temko, it’s a super little book, with good clear instructions for beginners like us, and giving background about both the offering of a thousand origami cranes as a symbol of longevity, and specifically the story of Sadako and the Thousand Cranes.  Older Brother, now that he is older, (more…)

We have just broken up from school for the holidays and our thoughts are turned towards Christmas next week. As well as reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol together for the first time, which we all greatly enjoyed, we have been reading other stories with a Christmas setting, including two multicultural versions of the Nativity story, the birth of Jesus.

The first is The Road to Bethlehem: A Nativity Story from Ethiopia told by Elizabeth Laird (Collins, 1987). Elizabeth Laird has spent a lot of time in Ethiopia gathering stories from the oral tradition and her writing here certainly asks to be read aloud – not only is the story told simply with plenty of direct speech to bring it alive, but for those children who are familiar with the story from their own traditions, there is likely to be a good deal of intrigued discussion in which the differences are explored, including new characters and miracles.

The illustrations too are full of extra fascinating details – their vibrancy and appeal to young listeners/readers make it hard to take on board that they are taken from 200-year-old Ethiopian manuscripts in the British Library! Laird has added fascinating notes to each picture, which can be dipped into alongside reading the text – one Older Brother was particulary struck by was an episode on the Flight into Egypt showing arrowheads sticking out of the road to stop them: “but Mary took the hand of her Child, and walked through unharmed.”

The second book is one I blogged about last year but didn’t actually manage to share with my boys – however, we have now read together Ian Wallace‘s beautifully illustrated version of The Huron Carol (Groundwood, 2006), based on an English translation of the Christmas carol written by a French Jesuit missionary, Father Jean de Brébeuf, for the Huron people in the 1600s. After reading through the first verse together line by line with its double-page-spread illustration, showing the people, landscapes and fauna of its Canadian roots, we have really enjoyed singing the whole carol from the music and words given at the end – in the original Huron, in French and in English. As we have pored over the familiar characters of the story in an unfamilar setting, and the baby Jesus wrapped in fur, surrounded by wolves and beavers, we have explored the reasons that the carol came into being.

We have all enjoyed sharing these books together – and any misgivings I might have had about confusing them with the different versions of what is to them a familiar story have been allayed – on the contrary, I believe their experience of the Christmas story has been enriched by them.