Siobhan Dowd wins Carnegie Medal

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Siobhan Dowd wins Carnegie Medal

June 26, 2009Siobhan Dowd, much missed PEN member and a leading force in the establishment of our Readers and Writer programme, has been awarded the Carnegie Medal for her posthumously published novel Bog Child. A full report on Siobhan's triumph and the award can be found on the Guardian website.
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Carnegie medal posthumously awarded to Siobhan Dowd

Siobhan Dowd's Bog Child, finished three months before her death from cancer, has taken the Carnegie medal for children's literature and made Dowd its first posthumous winner

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 June 2009 12.31 BST

A novel completed just three months before she died made Siobhan Dowd today the first ever posthumous winner of the most prestigious prize in children's literature, the Carnegie medal.

Bog Child, the story of a teenage boy who finds the body of a child in an Irish bog, was finished by Dowd in May 2007. She died of cancer that August at the age of 47, having only turned to writing in 2003. In just four short years, she penned four children's books: her first, A Swift Pure Cry, was also shortlisted for the Carnegie.

"It's infuriating that she didn't start writing earlier, that she couldn't go on. We've lost one of our great new voices, and they don't come along that often, not at Siobhan's standards," said her publisher and editor, David Fickling, who accepted the Carnegie medal on her behalf this lunchtime. "Bog Child was written with great intensity, when Siobhan was at the height of her powers, all the while being very ill ... You get to the end and are uplifted, and that's what she was like in person, too. She buoyed you up."

The book is "an absolutely astonishing piece of writing", said the librarian Joy Court, chair of the judging panel (the Carnegie medal winner is selected by 13 librarians from around the UK). "To be able to write like that when she was going through what she was going through is just astonishing – the sheer beauty of the language, the descriptions of the environment; she has such an amazing sense of place."

Bog Child intertwines two stories: that of the 16-year-old Fergus, who discovers the child in the bog in 1981 and thinks she has been murdered by the IRA, and that of the bog child, Mel, who turns out to have lived 2,000 years ago during the iron age. Fergus smuggles packages across the Northern Ireland border each day, believing them to contain semtex, while his brother goes on hunger strike in prison in an attempt to free Northern Ireland from "the misery of it. The mourning and the weeping. The vale of tears." Dowd's command of language is "extraordinary", said Fickling, as in her description of Mel's death: "Silver light fizzed and shot apart. Love fell in particles, like snow."

Dowd spent 20 years as a human-rights campaigner for PEN in England and New York before she turned to writing in 2003. "All that looking after other writers must have been preparation for writing," said Fickling. "There's a lovely letter which she wrote to her mother, where she said: 'I must get on with writing, I mustn't be modest any more.'" He recalled a conversation with Dowd on Waterloo footbridge, when he asked if she had started writing because she had cancer. "She said: 'Absolutely not. It's more of a hindrance than a spur.'" Her husband has said she "needed to experience life first in order to write to the standard she aspired to".

Dowd lived to see her first two books published, and to see her first, A Swift Pure Cry, win the Eilís Dillon award for a first-time children's author, writing on her blog at the time that it was "very precious to me, my first ever award". Her second novel, The London Eye Mystery, planned as the first in a series, won her the major Irish children's fiction prize, the Bisto award, which she also picked up last month, for the second year running, for Bog Child.

She's been "sweeping the board" where literary prizes are concerned, said Fickling, but winning the Carnegie would have been "very special" to her because it is organised by librarians who spend their days helping children find a way to read, a cause very close to her heart. She believed that "if a child can read, they can think, and if a child can think they are free", and in the few days before she died she set up the Siobhan Dowd Trust, which helps to bring books to disadvantaged children and to which her book royalties and prizewinnings go. "She was intensely practical, not airy-fairy or sentimental in any way," said Fickling. He added she would have been "overjoyed" to win the Carnegie, but would have found it "a terror" being on the seven-strong shortlist with the likes of Frank Cottrell Boyce, Eoin Colfer and Patrick Ness.

The Carnegie medal comes with no prize money but much prestige: in its 72-year history, it has been won by authors including Elizabeth Goudge, CS Lewis, Philip Pullman and Noel Streatfeild.

This morning's award ceremony also saw the 27-year-old illustrator Catherine Rayner win the Kate Greenaway medal for children's book illustration for her second title, Harris Finds His Feet. The book, inspired by an encounter in the wild with a hare and by Rayner's own large feet, follows the story of a small hare learning to hop with oversized paws. Court said the creation of Harris was "a triumph, from the way he moves and his expressions to his velvety fur". Rayner wins £5,000, and joins a distinguished list of former winners of the 50-year-old prize including Shirley Hughes, Raymond Briggs and Quentin Blake.