Novel set on remote Scottish island scoops top children’s book prize
Author Geraldine Mccaughrean has won a prestigious children’s book prize for the second time in 30 years for a novel set on the Scottish island of St Kilda.
Mccaughrean’s latest work, Where the World Ends, which follows a group of men and boys stranded on a sea stack on St Kilda after their rescue boat fails to arrive, was grant- ed the the CILIP Carnegie Medal.
The remote island, situated 64 kilometres off Uist, was evacuated completely in 1930 when all 36 inhabitants were moved to the mainland.
Her win, at an awards ceremony in London yesterday, comes 30 years after she scooped the same medal in 1988 for acclaimed novel A Pack of Lies.
Ms Mccaughrean, 67, the most shortlisted author in the history of the prize, said: “When I won the Carnegie 30 years ago, it felt like a licence to go on writing – to call myself an author.
“I am almost ashamed of how much I wanted to win again – just to prove to myself that it wasn’t a fluke.”
Canadian illustrator Sydney Smith won the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for the first time for his illustrations in Joanne Schwartz’s Town Is by the Sea, which depicts a day in the life of a boy growing up in a coal -mining town in the 1950s.
Ms Mccaughrean used her acceptance speech to deliver a passionate speech on the importance of young people’s right to language, expression, and information.
She said: “It’s been said often in recent years that ‘literary’ fiction for young people has had its day, [but] we master words by meeting them, not by avoiding them. The only way to make books – and knowledge – accessible is to give children the necessary words.
“The worst and most wicked outcome of all would be that we deliberately and wantonly create an underclass of citizens with a small but functional vocabulary. In my opinion, young readers should be bombarded with words like gamma rays, steeped in words like pot plants stood in water, pelted with them like confetti, fed on them like alphabetti spaghetti.”