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Pages to Prize

An interview with Melvin Burgess and Adele Geras about them both being nominated for the Carnegie Medal, published in the Manchester Evening News, 28 June 2001

TWO children’s authors from Manchester are in the running for the Carnegie Medal, the UK’s top prize in children’s literature.

Melvin Burgess, from Fallowfield, and Adele Geras, who lives in Didsbury, are both on this year’s shortlist – and Harry Potter doesn’t even get a look in!

“It’s great being nominated”, says Melvin. “It’s the award everyone wants because it’s picked by librarians – people who know what they’re doing.”

Children’s literature is in a golden age, thanks in part to a bespectacled trainee wizard, born on a train journey from Manchester to London. The Harry Potter books are the ones children everywhere want.

“The finest thing about them is they’ve got millions of kids reading,” says Burgess. “And once they find they enjoy reading they start looking for other books.”

It’s a view shared by Adele Geras: “Harry Potter has removed from children the fear of tackling a big, fat book. The Potter books have built up children’s reading stamina.”

Geras’s own book, Troy (Scholastic, £5.99), is a sizeable volume and, like Harry Potter, has also found an eager adult audience.

In reaching the Carnegie shortlist, Geras says: “I feel like I’ve been given a gold star after sitting at the back of the class for years and years.” For Geras, the author of more than 70 children’s books, this is the first time she’s been nominated for the award.

Burgess already has the 1996 Carnegie Medal to his name, for his teenage novel Junk. His new book, The Ghost Behind The Wall (Anderson Press, £9.99), is no less controversial. This time he’s written about a boy taunting his neighbour, an elderly man slowly being robbed of his mind by old age.

So nothing cute involving wizards and spells here then. Instead, a story about growing up and self-discovery. How does he face up to over-protective adults who might regard it as unsuitable for young readers?

“Whenever you read about kids picking on an old and helpless person it’s outrageous and so wrong,” says Burgess. “Kids see people getting old, which is why I wanted to write this book.

“My books are about important, exciting issues,” he adds. “I look for an imaginative, adventurous way of writing about them that isn’t preachy.”

For Geras, her novel took root during her schooldays with her liking for the stories of the ancient Greeks. “People today may go from childhood to adulthood without knowing them,” she says.

“I wanted to write about the siege of Troy because it’s a cracking good story – but it’s not a re-telling of it. I’ve written about the events from the women’s point of view. Women have always been the ones left to pick up the pieces and get on with the business of life. It’s their story I’ve told.”

But, she adds: “It’s basically a love story that just happens to be set in Troy – it could just as easily have been Salford or Withington!”

One thing’s for certain – the whimsical world of Harry, Hermione and Hogwarts has changed the reading habit of a generation, and for the first time in many years it’s cool to read books. Melvin Burgess, Adele Geras and, of course, J.K.Rowling, are feeding that habit.