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Coelho and Becker on their Yoto Carnegie wins
The Bookseller editorial team sits down with two of this year’s Yoto Carnegie medal-winners to chat about the UK’s longest-running children’s book award.
Joseph Coelho’s The Boy in the Maze (Otter-Barry Books), illustrated by Kate Milner, is a book about toxic masculinity and the complicated journey of growing up. The author was announced as the winner of the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing this week, in front of an audience of more than 600 children who were watching the live-streamed ceremony from the Cambridge Theatre in London.
“It felt very freeing in a way, because there are things you can say and talk about in a greater depth with older books, because you don’t have to worry so much about the appropriateness of the content,” says the author.
Coelho is the first Black British author to win the award, which celebrates outstanding literature for children and young people. “I was completely delighted to find out, it really is a dream come true,” he says. “With the Carnegie being judged by librarians, it comes with that kudos. They are people that read widely, and read a lot and really know their stuff.”
Coelho’s relationship with libraries goes all the way back to when he was a child himself, visiting the library to discover new books, study for his exams and meet up with friends. He also got his first Saturday job at his local library, and worked at The British Library when he was studying at university. As a writer, Coelho is constantly visiting libraries for festivals and events, most recently as part of the Library Marathon—one of his laureate tenure projects—through which he sought to encourage people to visit their local branch.
The Boy in the Maze felt like a return in many ways; I started out writing poetry [and plays] for adults long before I was published
During the conversation, Coelho is at the train station, travelling back to London from a library event he just led for 80 children, the minority of whom had library cards. This is one of the problems that he is hoping to address, and librarians across the country are waiting “with sign-up sheets on hand” to help support his mission. “I’ve had kids come up to me because they haven’t been in a library before, and they pointed at the books and said, ‘How do I get the books? Can I get the books? Can I take a book?’,” he says. “And it’s so lovely to kneel down and say, ‘Yes, it is free, you can have a card, you can take home any of these books’.”
Meeting children in libraries and schools has also given the author a profound insight into the interests and concerns of young people. “In schools, you just get a feel for the kinds of things that young people are asking about, especially teenagers; they will often ask about money, and about life opportunities and about your inspirations,” he says. While writing The Boy in the Maze, Coelho drew from these conversations with children as well as his own experiences growing up. “This a personal story as well,” he reflects, “I was thinking back to when I was a teenager, and my experiences with toxic masculinity, and what we all go through with puberty and trying to work ourselves out.
Reporting by Melina Spanoudi
Some years ago, American author-illustrator Aaron Becker moved with his young family from America to the faded grandeur of Granada. “I was amazed by the history and the architecture of that city,” he tells The Bookseller. “It’s one of these ancient cities that’s gone through several different empires. The evidence of it is there in architecture... It’s not hidden underneath the rubble. [There are] cathedrals built inside of the Alhambra [a historic Islamic palace]. So I had this notion of wanting to do a book about history somehow.”
The result—following some false starts and several other projects—is the wordless picture book The Tree and the River (Walker Books), about the rich history of layered civilisations, winning both the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration and the Shadowers’ Choice Award (voted for by young readers) at the London ceremony.
But just like the long-suffering tree and river, the manuscript itself endured some loneliness before reaching readers. Becker, who is now based back in Western Massachusetts, tells The Bookseller: “I had a story about a tree watching over history, and then I shelved it for a long time. And then in a critique group that I was in with fellow illustrators, they were sort of trying to get me to think about different ways of telling that same story. And it turned into a story about stone instead of a tree. Then it wasn’t until I was finished with some other projects, and I went back and looked at those original sketches of the tree, and it wouldn’t let me go.
“I was like, ‘I still feel like there’s something to do—and it’s amazing...’ It’s like the river in the book is sort of the idea of time passing. The river of time is circuitous, and it moves around and it has got no straightforward path. And I think that is definitely how the artistic process is—you can’t really wield it. You can control it a bit to tell a story, but for the most part, you have to wait for it to come into what it needs to be interesting.”
What this prize gives me, what the prize money gives any artist, is the time to continue at the pace I work at, which is incredibly slowly
To prepare for the story’s illustrations, Becker constructed a scale model of the book’s rolling landscape, which he then slowly transformed with clay and wood over many months.
Published in April this year, his painstaking exploration of civilisations has been rewarded. Yoto Carnegie judges described The Tree and the River as “a beautiful visual narrative of the natural world and the impact of humankind that invites readers to become absorbed in the landscapes”.
Becker is grateful that the prize money—of over £5,000—from the double win will buy him more time—something he fully appreciates after a former life as a designer in San Francisco’s dot-com bubble before he switched to film design and then finally to children’s books. “Publishers are constantly making investments into books by paying out advances,” he says. “But what this prize gives me, what the prize money gives any artist, is the time to continue at the pace I work at, which is incredibly slowly. It gives me the time and the space to do things the way I want to be able to do them. A lot of illustrators and writers I know take on too many projects, do several books a year, just to make ends meet."
Reporting by Heloise Wood & Matilda Battersby
