Today we have a guest post about the CILIP Carnegie Medal from one of our Student Librarians, Beckie Lees;
"The Carnegie Award was established in 1936 in memory of the philanthropist Robert Carnegie, he was a self made industrialist and after his great experience of using libraries as a child made him resolve to the solution if he ever came into money he'd use it to establish free libraries. Carnegie set up 2800 libraries across the English speaking world and by the time he died over half the libraries in Britain were Carnegie libraries.
Every year a new Carnegie shortlist is announced to the writer of the outstanding book for children. This year in the LRC book Club, 'South Sefton Reads', we decided to each have a cheeky read of the books shortlisted. I chose to read 'The Lie Tree' by Frances Hardinge; it's such an amazing story, I wouldn't know how to describe it. The story is so unbelievable (in a good way) and full of adventure. I'd definitely be happy if it won.
There are quite a few brilliant books up for this years award, with authors such as Patrick Ness, Marcus Sedgwick and Jenny Valentine. All the books look really appealing! The Carnegie award always picks several books that can be tailored to all different people as they are a number of genres. All the shortlisted books are available in the LRC, if you're interested come and take a look."
On Wednesday 9th September 2015, Waterstone's Liverpool One held 'An evening with Patrick Ness'.
For those of you that don't know, Patrick Ness is an American born English author of nine books: 2 novels for adults (The Crash of Hennington and The Crane Wife), 1 short story collection for adults (Topics About Which I Know Nothing) and 6 novels for young adults (The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, Monsters of Men, A Monster Calls, More Than This and The Rest of Us Just Live Here).
For these books, he has won the Carnegie Medal twice, the Costa Children’s Book Award, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Red House Book Award, the Jugendliteratur Preis, the UKLA Award and the Booktrust Teenage Prize.
For the evening with... we were treated to an extract from The Rest of Us Just Live Here followed by an in conversation session and a lively Q&A with the audience. Afterwards, there was a chance to get books signed and Patrick Ness has kindly signed the library copies of his novels which are currently on display in the LRC, alongside a signed limited edition poster. If you would like to keep up to date, then visit the Patrick Ness website.
You have probably heard about Patrick Ness most recently in the news for the amazing online campaign, fundraising for the Syrian Refugee Crisis. In his own words, the reason he chose to set up his page and what motivated him to start this fundraising campaign:
“I’d been feeling upset about the refugee crisis for a while, especially at the UK government’s response, which I consider morally feeble. With the picture of Aylan Kurdi, I just didn’t feel like Tweeting my anger was ever going to be near enough.
On the spur of the moment, I set up the Virgin Money Giving page with simplest parameters and offered to my Twitter followers to match up to £10,000. In just over two days, we’ve crossed £500,000.
It’s INCREDIBLE. Other authors joined in to match funds, people from everywhere have been donating £1 to £20,000. It’s astonishing, and I think testament to how many people want to help, how many people feel moved but helpless and want to be able to do something. I just happened to get angry at the luckiest moment possible.”
To see this amazing fundraising effort you can visit the website here.
