Updates from our Carnegie Reading Group

A year on and our Carnegie Reading Group is still going strong. We are a group of current and ex-Goldsmiths MA students who meet on a 3-weekly basis to discuss one of the Carnegie Medal Winners. As you may have seen in previous blogposts I kicked off this ‘project’ back in April or May 2020.

The Making of Man (1960)

The Making of Man by I W Cornwall , illustrated by M Maitland Howard, is a non-fiction book about the evolution of the human race. It has been superceeded by other titles and is long since out of print. In fact it is the last non-fiction book which won the Carnegie Medal. Possibly the committee

A Gathering Light (2003)

I am sort of stuck, ignobly, on Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Lantern Bearers. It has been on my night table for months, literally. I want to read it and I must. In the meantime, it’s stopping my blogging progress, but not my Carnegie reading project. With my book group, which meets every three weeks, we have been forging

Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958)

What do you write about Tom’s Midnight Garden, a ‘modern classic’ if there ever was one? A book about which Phillip Pulman wrote that it was ‘a perfect book’? It is one of the Carnegies of Carnegies (i.e. the top 10 Carnegie winners) and is widely read and loved today and has been adapted for

A Grass Rope (1957)

I have been debating how to approach this particular blog post for a while, choosing to ‘catch up’ on the two Carnegie Medal Winners that I had to visit the British Library to read – Visitors from London and The Story of a Valley. But now we are here, in front of A Grass Rope

Visitors from London (1940)

Written by Kitty Barne, illustrated by Ruth Gervis. In the summer of 1939, the four Farrar children come to spend the summer with their aunt and become involved in Operation Pied Piper when their aunt get wrangled into becoming a ‘Housemother’ for 17 evacuees at the nearby farmhouse ‘Steadings’. The children are involved, first with

A Valley Grows Up (1953)

Osmond was a prolific writer and illustrator ( British Library holds 97 titles either written or illustrated by him), yet none are still in print, though some are available secondhand through abebooks.com. However, A Valley Grows Up is so expensive, even secondhand, that I had to go to the British Library and read their copy.

The Last Battle (1956)

The Last Battle was written by CS Lewis and illustrated by Pauline Baynes. In fact, Pauline Baynes’ illustrations are so iconic CS Lewis wrote to her: “is it not rather ‘our’ medal? I’m sure the illustrations were taken into account as well as the text.” The Last Battle is, in every sense of the word,

The Little Bookroom (1955)

The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon, published by Oxford University Press in 1955, with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. I am continually humbled by the amount of stuff I don’t know about children’s literature. Eleanor Farjeon is a name I recognise from the shelves at the children’s library, or possibly an anthology of children’s verse, but

Knight Crusader (1954)

Knight Crusader was written by Ronald Welch in 1954. My edition was published in 1970. It is not illustrated by William Dobbs, which is a shame as apparently, his drawings are incredible. Knight Crusader is the first book in a series about the military exploits of the fictional Carey family published between 1954 and 1972.