Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are crowned greatest children's book ever in BBC Culture poll
Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are has been crowned the greatest children’s book ever in a BBC Culture poll of book experts from around the world, with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland clocking in second and Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking coming third.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince was fourth, while J R R Tolkien’s The Hobbit came fifth and Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights came sixth. C S Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe polled in seventh, followed by A A Milne and E H Shepard’s Winnie-the-Pooh in eighth, E B White and Garth Williams’ Charlotte’s Web in ninth and Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake’s Matilda in tenth.
L M Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar also squeezed in the top 20. The full list can be found here.
BBC Culture has previously conducted major polls of film and TV critics to decide on the greatest films and TV shows in a particular category, but said for this year “we felt we needed to finally turn our attention to another art form so deeply embedded in all our lives – books”, adding "after all, whatever our pastimes as we grow older, many of us share in the joy of reading at a young age, in and out of school.”
It added: “It also felt like just the moment to survey children’s books because of the recent conversation around how they are sorely undervalued compared to adult literature.”
In an interview last year, on BBC Radio 4’s "Today" programme, the writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce lamented the current lack of conversation around children’s books.
Children’s writing has also been hitting the headlines recently with the furore over the rewriting of Roald Dahl’s novels for modern sensibilities – and more generally, the widespread concern over the growing movement in the US towards banning children’s books, including many dealing with racial and LGBTQ+ themes.
BBC Culture polled 177 experts, including critics, authors and publishing figures, from 56 different countries, including authors Hannah Gold and M G Leonard; Children’s Laureate Wales, Connor Allen; and Jennifer Horan, chair of CILIP Youth Libraries Group.
Each voter listed their 10 greatest children’s books, which were scored and ranked to produce the top 100. BBC Culture said: “While of course far from definitive, the answers we have gleaned are fascinating – and we hope will make readers both wistful for the books they loved in their youth and ready to try out titles that passed them by, or were published after they came of age; for there is no reason that the greatest children’s literature shouldn’t be equally nourishing to an adult."
The end result is a list that “reflects the vast scope of children’s literature through the eras”, from the Panchatantra, a collection of Indian children’s stories dating back to the 2nd century BC, to the newest book in the list, A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll (Knights Of), published in 2020.
The list also has “its limitations and biases” BBC Culture said. For example, 74 of the 100 books featured were first published in the English language, with the next most popular language being Swedish, with nine entries.
Meanwhile, books published between the 1950s and 1970s were most prevalent, which may be related to the age profile of voters, the majority of whom were born in the 1970s and 1980s. Fourteen of the top 100 books were published this century.
