Announcement: Carnegie and Greenaway nominations

October 12th 2016

That’s right, the nominations for the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Awards 2017 have been announced! We were very excited to get a sneak peek earlier this week and we’ve been dying to share the lists with you ever since. This was a record-breaking year for nominations so we are so chuffed to be involved in the awards this year – there are some brilliant titles ripe for shadowing here. There were a few trusty favourites (we’re looking at you Chris Riddell, with your impressive four nominations!) along with some new talent, including a great range of publishers from little independents to the big players. Starting with the Carnegie, we were pleased to see previously nominated Peters Book of the Year authors Holly Bourne, Julie Mayhew and Brian Selznick, plus Cressida Cowell who was also a speaker at our Love Literacy conference 2016. Covering a wide range of themes from feminism, thanks to Holly Bourne and Louise O’Neill, coming of age and first love thanks to Juno Dawson and Eve Ainsworth, and younger modern classics like How to Fight a Dragon’s Fury and Pugs of the Frozen North. We were especially pleased to see a difficult theme emerge from some of the titles - refugees and immigration issues. This was handled beautifully in Vanessa Altin’s The Pomegranate Tree and Bessora and Barroux’s moving Alpha. We think it’s so important for awards and literature to recognise struggles that are going on in the world and present these to children (and adults) through books and other mediums to help build empathy and understanding. Moving on to the Greenaway list, and it appears a menagerie of animals have descended onto the nominations! From lions to lizards, bears to birds, these illustrations are a feast for the eyes for animal fans. There are some cross-overs here with the Carnegie list; could we have a double-win following in the footsteps of Patrick Ness and Jim Kay in 2012 with A Monster Calls? Alpha, The Wolves of Currumpaw (by William Grill, last year’s Greenaway winner), Pugs of the Frozen North, and The Marvels all feature on both nomination lists. As well as Chris Riddell’s obligatory mountain of nominations, Steve Antony, Catherine Rayner and Jim Field all have more than one nomination for their illustrations. As well as new talent and stars of our 2016 calendar, Jo Empson, Meg McLaren and Lane Smith, we also have some illustrators keeping it in the family: Jessica Ahlberg and Chloe Inkpen. We’re spoilt for choice – do we want former Laureate Malorie Blackman to win the medal, or are we keen for Love Literacy 2016 speaker Frank Cottrell-Boyce to beat the competition? Horatio Clare and Jane Matthews’ Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot recently won the Branford Boase award – will they scoop a Carnegie medal too? Do we want the king of illustration Chris Riddell to bag the prize again or do we want one of the illustrators from our calendar to have their time in the spotlight? We’re so excited to see who makes the longlists – we don’t envy the job of the judges with all these fantastic books on the list. The longlists will be announced 16^th February 2017, so you’ve got plenty of time to get reading and decide which of these are your favourites. To see the full list, click here, and be sure to Tweet us via @Petersbooks to let us know what you think of the nominations!