I will be posting properly about the Award tomorrow – just to let you know the news in the meantime that Helen Limon is the winner of this year’s 2011 Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children’s Book Award for Om Shanti, Babe. Runner-up was Karon Alderman for For Keeps, and Michelle Richardson received a Special Mention for Tek.
The Award was announced at Seven Stories in Newcastle, and the occasion also marked the launch of Too Much Trouble, winner of the Award last year, by Tom Avery, and of The Filth Licker by Christy Burne, a sequel to her 2009 winner Takeshita Demons
This great official photo shows (l-r) Helen, Tom and Karon with the three published books. You can also see some of my photos from the Awards Ceremony here; and read more about the Francves Lincoln Divers Voices Award here.
The Oxford English Dictionary has revealed 1,840 newly revised and updated words in its online edition.
In all, the famous dictionary has added 98,000 revised and new entries since building an online edition in March 2000. The update added entries for everything from crystal methamphetamine to network neutrality.
Here are a few of our favorites from the list: “auto-complete n. A software feature that uses text already entered in a given field to predict or generate the characters the user is likely to enter next; familiar to anyone who has used predictive text or search boxes on websites. [First recorded in 1992]”
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
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| Dick King-Smith |
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| Brian Jacques |
We're only five weeks into the new year, and already the children's book world has lost two giants.
Dick King-Smith died on January 4th at the age of 88, and on Saturday,
Brian Jacques, was felled by a heart attack. He was 71.
After learning that King-Smith had died, I went to my bookshelf and started rereading my favorite series of his, early chapter books that feature a small, but determined girl named Sophie. Yes, King-Smith is justifiably famous for his animal stories, most notably
The Sheep Pig, which was made into the movie
Babe, but the Sophie books, while not as well known, are just as good, at least to me.
The series starts with
Sophie's Snail (when she's 4) and ends with
Sophie's Lucky (when she's 8). Throughout all six books, the reader sees Sophie mature, yet her essential nature remains the same. Of small and of stocky build, she is determined, forthright, and as unstoppable as a bulldozer. She does not approve of lying or crying. And, from book one, her strongest desire is to be a lady farmer. In
Sophie's Snail, she has to content herself with her herds and flocks of wood lice, centipedes, and other creepy crawlies. By book two, she has a pet cat named Tom (later changed to Tomboy after she produces a litter of kittens); book three brings not only a rabbit named Beano, a gift from Great-great Aunt Al, but a terrier puppy christened Puddle lands on her lap on Christmas Day. The series ends with her much closer to her dream of owning a farm than she--or her readers--might have imagined.
I devoured the books one after the other. At the end it was sad to realize that they'll be no more books from Dick King-Smith. I suppose now I'll have to start Brian Jacques' Redwall series. That one does have a final book,
Roque Crew, due out in May.
