Karen Mountney, Children’s Programme Director for the Edinburgh International Book Festival reveals the ins and outs of organising the 100s of children’s events that sit right at the heart of the book festival’s programme.
In 2003 Michael Morpurgo was appointed children’s laureate, following hot on the heels of Quentin Blake and Anne Fine. Here he discusses the current state of literature and literacy within the classrooms in the UK – and it's not all good news.Two of the UK's leading experts on writing for children explore some of the highs and the lows in the world of children’s literature. Award winning writer and former Children's Laureate, Anne Fine suggests that all is not so rosy and voices some concern over the quality of writing for children.
Anne Fine
Take one view of children’s literature, and you will perhaps buy the line that we have moved into some sort of Golden Age; never have so many fine authors deployed such a range of skills to catch and keep the attention of young readers. Take the other view and you’ll be arguing that the prolonged emphasis on ‘accessibility’ has proved a disaster, and any writer for children who now makes serious demands on young readers has become all but unpublishable.
The truth lies, as ever, somewhere in between. There has always been a problem making judgements about books for young readers. It shows at its most acute when prizes are being dished out. Stephen King and Jeffrey Archer will never be in the running for the Whitbread or the Nobel Prize for Literature. But if you’re trying to turn a generation on to the pleasures of reading, should the laurels go to the author who pleases most readers more of the time? And what better way to judge that than counting up sales? In which case, just as Enid Blyton would have won every prize going for years, so J. K. Rowling and Jacqueline Wilson between them would swan off with all of them now.
Or should the honours be given to those whose novels are likely to have some lasting and transfiguring effect on the very few readers who can give them their due? Or even to those authors whose work balances most neatly between the two ends of the spectrum? No end in sight to that conundrum, so let’s move on to the next problem.
The Harry Potter craze woke up the book trade to the commercial possibilities of the children’s market. What had been a quiet backwater was suddenly mainstream. Once, books by Roald Dahl were the only ones everyone’s aunty knew about. All others were pretty much uniformly ignored. While there was a level playing field for all the books published in any one year, the best stood out. But now the bean counters in publishing have caught on to the fact that there’s a huge market out there to be tapped, the very same pressures on the adult book market are now facing the children's literature market: multi-book contracts (So much easier for sustained marketing); high concept books (Bound to be spin-offs with this one); celebrity authors (The journalists will be queueing up); and, of course, ‘filmic’ (Fingers crossed!).
In this kind of market, the ‘best’ books become those most likely to command media attention. After all, everyone in the whole wide world – especially the childless – are experts on children: how they should be behaving, how much telly they should watch, and what they should be reading.
Enter the shock-jocks of 'kiddy lit': writers who’ve chosen to (as their admirers always put it) ‘push out the boundaries’ – as if children’s literature had not always covered sex and death, mental and physical distress, and abuse of every sort going.
So it’s never the subject matter, merely the way the writer approaches it, that makes a shock-jock novel. And it’s simple enough to tell when the author’s aim was principally to garner press attention: you know some readers will be worse off for having read the book. A children’s author may, of course, write honestly and vividly about, say, vile attitudes to blacks, women, Jews, the physically handicapped – whoever. But if you know that at the end of the book someone from the target group will come out feeling, not more enlightened about those who don’t understand them, but humiliated, less confident, altogether smaller, then it’s as if the author has taken the side of the bullies in order to make a bigger buck, and the work has no place in any catalogue of books for young people.
Another big change in the world of children’s literature has been in the style and content of reviews. In the 1980s and 1990s, courses on children’s literature folded one after another as the attention of would-be librarians switched from reading and discussing the books they'd be offering to young people, to learning more computer-related skills. At the same time, teacher training colleges became far more interested in how you teach than what you teach.
So it's no longer unusual to read reviews along the lines of ‘my eight-year-old loved it’, or ‘helpful for the autobiography module'. When judgement that stems from wide reading and an informed sensibility becomes rarer, it’s easier for tosh to triumph: the awful ‘poets’ with their tiresome doggerel; portentous books where it’s the pathos of the subject matter, rather than the writing itself, that’s garnering the respect. It's all too easy to wring the heartstrings of the young, and Philip Pullman is right to scorn these sorts of authors as relying on ‘pilfered tears’.
So where’s the good news?
Here. Each book needs an author. And most of those authors have always, and will always, sit down to write when a particular notion seizes them. The individual vision can’t be kept down. Out there, each year, are books in plenty that were conceived without any awareness of, or driving interest in, ‘the market’ or ‘what publishers want’. These are books written alone, with deep concentration and sustained effort. They are novels that take as long as they need to be finished because the author's only real concern was to match their original vision as closely as they could manage.
Then, as the Dutch writer, Imme Dros, once pointed out, when the words fit perfectly, language turns into literature, just as when the shoe fits, Cinderella can go to the ball.
Anne Fine is one of the UK's most distinguished and popular writers for children of all ages. Amongst many other awards, she has been the Children's Laureate, won Children's Fiction Prize, and twice been awarded both the Whitbread Children's Award and the Carnegie Medal.
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