Carnegie & Greenaway Children's Book Awards 70th anniversary winners

Meg Rosoff has won the 2007 CILIP Carnegie Medal for ‘Just In Case’, her second novel for young people. As the CILIP Carnegie Medal celebrates its 70th anniversary, Rosoff joins the ranks of distinguished children’s writers of the 20th & 21st centuries who have won this coveted medal since its inception in 1937.

'To me,” says Rosoff,“the CILIP Carnegie Medal is particularly special. ‘Just In Case’ is the sort of book that people either love or hate; that they either identify with, or they don’t. For a panel of librarians to agree that it deserves this historic medal is just amazing; I’m thrilled, honoured and astonished.”

The CILIP Carnegie Medal celebrates its 70th Anniversary in 2007. It is the UK’s longest running and most respected award for children’s writing. Over the last seven decades it has come to be regarded as the arbiter of quality in writing for children and young people. Since 1937, the children’s librarians who annually select the short list and winning title, have recognised world class writers and frequently spotted fresh talent ahead of the market. Meg Rosoff joins the list of past Medal winners that includes many of the great writers of 20th and 21st centuries: Eleanor Farjeon, Anne Fine, Elizabeth Goudge, CS Lewis, Mary Norton, Noel Streatfeild, Philip Pullman and David Almond to name a few.

It’s a case of third time lucky for author-illustrator Mini Grey, who has scooped the 2007 CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal, the UK’s oldest and most prestigious award for children’s book illustration, after being shortlisted three times in the past four years.

Her book ’The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon’, which relates what happens after the dish and the spoon run away together at the end of the nursery rhyme. The devoted duo find fame and fortune stateside with an acrobatic circus act, but when the money runs out, they fall in with some shady sharp knives, and pay a heavy price for turning to a life of crime