And the winners are....
The Bisto Book of the Year Awards
AND THE WINNERS ARE…
The Bisto Book of the Year Awards
The results for the fifteenth year of the Bisto Book of the Year Awards were announced last week. Inevitably there are agreements and disagreements about the results although there can be no questioning the achievement of Kate Thompson in becoming the first writer to win the Book of the Year Award for the third time.
Her novel Annan Water, already reviewed by Village, is the tale of two teenagers in rural Scotland falling in love and finding the solace from the tragedies and vagaries of their lives. The style is aqueous, shimmering and its intertwining of the narrative with an old ballad of doomed lovers highly intriguing. My hesitation about the book still lies in the fact that it is like part one of a story and not a complete unit.
The Ellis Dillon Award went to An Bhó Riabach from An Gum a wonderful retelling of the old tale The Striped Cow. With superb illustrations that show just how much this aspect of young children's literature had changed since the first Bisto Book of the Year awards, reflecting it does how figurative art itself has changed.
Óisín McGann was honoured with a Merit Award and €1,000 for his debut novel The Gods and their Machines, my personal favourite on the shortlist, tackling as it does in a direct and accessible way so many problems besetting the human race and yet never descending into allegory, always operating within the genre of adventure fiction.
Two more Merit Awards went to Oliver Jeffers for How to Catch A Star and to the illustrators of Something Beginning with a P.
Something Beginning with a P has in an amazingly short time become a classic for all ages and richly deserves the acclaim and success.
In a short list where the main novels dealt almost exclusively with teenage angst and reality, I would loved to have seen two other novels included. One is Tribal Scars by Pat Devany, the best book I have read about teenage life today in a provincial Irish town. Highly relevant and one that should really get the lads reading.
The other novel is Good Girls Don't by Claire Hennesssy, a riveting account of teenage hedonism in Dublin that must surely cause spasms of recognition among urban adolescents all over the country.
I hope that the Bisto Shortlist will get everyone reading and forming their own opinions, that is if you can find a public library or a book shop that has all the titles on their shelves.
Tony Hickey