Isol and Victoria

If I rant about the lack of television coverage of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award ceremony in the UK, someone is bound to tell me it was on somewhere. (Was it?) I was lucky several years running in that I went to Sweden for half term and there it was, right on time. Big celebration with royalty and everything.

Music. Speeches. Foreign award winners shivering under blankets. With so much rubbish readily available, why not broadcast a little ceremony and very little pomp, even if it is rather foreign?

Argentinian winner Isol even danced the tango. Apparently. I bet Seamus Heaney didn’t do Riverdance for the Nobel prize.

She’s short, Isol. Although that sounds both too personal as well as rude (nothing wrong with being short). What I probably mean is I had no idea Crown Princess Victoria is quite so tall. We’ve not yet had cause to meet up, so I didn’t know. Taller than the minister for culture.

You see, if I’d been able to watch, I’d not have to resort to going on about what people looked like in the official photographs.

I expect there was less shivering, and possibly no blankets this year. They appear to have moved the whole shindig indoors. It doesn’t matter about the Swedish royals. They have practised sitting out of doors – totally umbrella-less – and smiling through almost anything. But foreigners, they are a more tender species.

As well as short. I can think of several non-tall winners. Philip Pullman, on the other hand, turned out to be taller than I had expected, so he probably beat Victoria.

And I still worry about the sheer amount of money. Is it right to give that much to one individual? I’d almost decided it wasn’t, but then I thought about people winning the lottery. All they’ve done is buy a ticket. At least these winners are professional writers and artists; one of whom is chosen every year.

Perhaps it is OK. Especially for someone who tangoes.

Happy Birthday, Emil!

I have it on fairly good authority that Emil in Lönneberga is fifty today. Although – as you probably know – he must be quite a lot older, really. Something like just over a hundred, maybe?

Astrid Lindgren’s Emil lived at the beginning of the last century, and to start with he was a little boy. (When he was a fully proper adult he became chairman of the local council.)

But, today it’s fifty years since Astrid needed to calm her grandson who was having a tantrum, and so she came up with Emil. Hujedamej.

The theory is that if Emil was a child today, he’d be diagnosed with something or other. And then he’d be given medication to take for it. (Only in some countries, I’d say.)

To be perfectly truthful, as a child I found Emil a bit too boisterous for my comfort. I like a quieter kind of fictional hero. He got up to so many naughty things, all the time! But there was good in him, I could see that. I was very grateful I wasn’t his sister, being raised to the top of the flagpole. But she did ask.

When the film version came, I was really too old, but this being a National Treasure kind of situation, I went to see it, along with the rest of the country. We can all still hear Allan Edwall as the screen Dad shouting Eeeemmiiil!!!

And the soup tureen adventure always worried me more than it should. I inherited a soup tureen, and all I can think of when I see it is to imagine Emil’s head stuck inside.

I should start thinking of soup.

ALMA 2013

When is one o’clock not one? Or twelve, or two?

I failed on a technicality yesterday. The sandwich was ready, the orange was peeled and the tea just right. So was I. Ready, more than right or peeled. I was going to sit down to watch the announcement of who would be five million kronor better off. Yes, it was ALMA time. The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award was about to be awarded.

It was 11.52. It was 11.52 both in the UK and CET. That’s not possible. I checked. It’s before summer time, so it wasn’t that either. But my noon announcement was not about to happen until one. Or so the countdown thingy suggested. At 12.01 facebook (yes, fb again) pinged, and one of my savvy fb friends announced the award had gone to Isol.

I refreshed all pages that could be refreshed. It said 58 minutes to go. I did what any sensible bookwitch would do. I picked up my early lunch and went to read a book instead.

At one I tried to see if the system would be more amenable. It wasn’t. It was error messages all round. The ALMA press office had emailed the glad tidings at 12.11, so I knew I could expect no more.

Isol is an Argentinian illustrator, cartoonist, graphic artist, writer, singer and composer. From what I could see in the press release there were only Spanish titles, and whereas I have actually heard of her, it was yet another Nobel style choice of someone many people won’t know at all. I imagine the Spanish speaking world – which is large – do know her work.

I wish Isol all the best, but I can’t help feeling that my first thought when I saw ISOL in capitals on fb was that it was an organisation getting the money this year. I believe organisations can do more with these kind of sums. I sometimes wonder if the jury are aware quite how much money they are handing out. I mean really, really.

Bookwitch bites #94

I am the proud owner of a signed copy of Basu ni Notte. And I didn’t even know that it was called that, because I don’t read Japanese. (I know. It looks rather like Italian.) That in itself will tell you that my reading of Basu ni Notte has not gone terribly well, either, since I don’t read Japanese, and the book is in Japanese. Picture book, but still.

So I stand to benefit from the new reading guides issued by the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award people. They have just come up with twelve guides for books by ten recipients of the ALMA, one of whom is Ryoji Arai. He shared the prize with Philip Pullman in 2005. That’s when I was crazy enough to go to Gothenburg just to hear Philip speak. A side effect was meeting up with this Japanese author and illustrator.

He supposedly didn’t speak English, but he did – a little – when it came to the crunch.

No language troubles at all with Marion Lloyd. As you can tell, I’ve not ‘bitten’ anyone here for a while, which is why I am offering you old news. Or not news so much, as a link to what I thought was a very nice blog post by Susie Day about this super-editor when she retired.

I don’t know why we seldom write really lovely articles about people before they retire, or worse, die. I want to know now. Except I don’t know what I want to know, because you haven’t written about those fantastic people yet.

And speaking of fantastic and reading, I eventually enticed Daughter to read the best book of 2012. None of us have got round to much reading during the recent eating season, but once the suggestion was made, she found it hard to stop until she was done. She, too, liked Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein.

I have no expectation of reading hundreds of books during 2013, but a few would be nice. I need to start collecting for the next ‘best of’ award. But as Cathy Butler said in her blog post about reading speed, we are allowed to be really slow. It’s not better to be fast.

Although it would be handy.

In the Land of Twilight

No, this isn’t about that Twilight! This is one of the more unknown (to me) books by Astrid Lindgren, and one I feel certain I never read before coming across the English translation. In fact, the description of the story had me worried in case it turned out to be about the little fat man with the propeller on his back.

It’s not, but apparently it led to the books about Karlsson-on-the-roof, so my fears were not totally unfounded.

The young boy Goran (Göran) has a bad leg, so can’t go out. He is visited by strange Mr Lilyvale who takes him out on adventures around Stockholm, but only in the twilight hour. Goran gets to have all sorts of adventures this way, seeing unusual sights and getting to do all sorts of things. He drives a bus and talks to an elk (I refuse to say moose!) and meets the King of Twilight.

Marit Törnqvist has done the illustrations, and because we are so used to seeing other people’s pictures in Astrid Lindgren’s books, this almost doesn’t feel like an Astrid Lindgren. Marit’s pictures of Stockholm by twilight are dreamlike, and very attractive.

I want to go on that tram.

Bookwitch bites #81

If you fancy listening to Eoin Colfer swear and curse you shouldn’t click on this video from the launch of Paul O’Brien’s debut adult crime novel Blood Red Turns Dollar Green. (No, I don’t know what that means.) It seems Eoin was looking forward to having left the children’s world behind (why?), when he discovered there were children present, so he had to clean up his act in praising his fellow Wexford author. Or he might have made that up. He’s also shorter than the first presenter in this clip.

The sound quality isn’t marvellous, and it sounds like it’s raining (it’s Ireland, after all), but you have to admire an author who uses his speech at someone else’s launch to talk about himself… Just joking. I still have to get over the beard.

Mentioning Eoin some more, I see the last Artemis Fowl is almost with us. July can’t get here soon enough. Artemis Fowl and the Last Guardian. It sounds like a newspaper advert, but that’s OK.

Being Irish could be enough to enter the multilingual poetry competition run by the Manchester Children’s Book Festival. If you are lucky enough to be aged under 19, and you have a first language other than English you can enter this competition with a poem in your own language. English native speakers learning a foreign language can also enter by writing a poem in the other  language.

I have no poetry writing skills, so it’s just as well I’m old. For anyone else who is interested, go to Mother Tongue Other Tongue for more information. And write fast. The deadline is 28th May. The Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy will present the prizes to winners on 30th June.

That other award – the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award – will be presented on the 28th May, and I can’t tell you how relieved I am. I thought it was going to be on the 22nd (for some obscure reason, not known even to me) and worried in case Crown Princess Victoria had double-booked herself, forgetting she has a baby that needs Christening. On the 22nd. But all is well, and Guus Kuijer will presumably be able to shake the royal hand after all.

Last year when I was searching for foreign reads I believed it’d be both easy and logical for me to read something Finnish. Not actually in Finnish. Obviously. Failed in my research and gave up. Then the other day the Resident IT Consultant (who clearly had nothing better to do than surf the net) sent me a link to an article about Finnish books (which had been translated – into Swedish).

Sinikka and Tiina Nopola are sisters writing books about a Finnish rapper by the name of Risto. I love the original title, Risto Räppääjä. You really can’t have too many äs in a word. Expecting great things I went in search of Risto in a more manageable shape. He’s out of print… So that’s that.

Räppääjä, Räppääjä!

Small world

‘It’s a shame Adèle Geras moved away from Manchester,’ sighed Mrs Moomin. We had lunch together yesterday, despite it being Friday the 13th. I’m always a bit startled when conversations go in unexpected directions, and I forget that Mrs Moomin knew Adèle for ages, living near her. Considering my limited social life, I’m surprised I have managed to know two people who separately know Adèle.

Mrs Moomin and I were at a Swedish lunch, doing our best to avoid being 13 at the table, and managed something like 14 1/2. Borås Girl hosted, and we all brought some food. (To tell the truth, I didn’t do well. I ran out of time, so offered the bare minimum pilfered from my freezer.) These ladies are seriously good at cooking and baking. There was even Swede salad.

OK, if I can just tear my thoughts away from the cheesecake, I’ll get to Borås Girl’s Swedish speaking Estonian friend, Mrs Linguist, whom she met at her German class. I’ve been passing Swedish DVDs for BG to lend her friend, and felt I ‘knew’ her slightly, so it was good to chat when we met. As civilised people we swapped business cards, and that’s when she worked out we had already been in contact with each other.

I am very forgetful, but recalled sending a perfect stranger some pages from an Astrid Lindgren book a few years ago. (No, I didn’t tear them out. I copied.) Mrs Linguist was the perfect stranger, introduced by Professor Linguistics who reckoned I was the likeliest person she knew who would own a copy of the Bullerby book. Very astute.

So that was nice. More coincidences.

Mrs Linguist was accompanied by Baby Linguist (who, quite frankly, was not too keen on all those cackling women), and her visiting Estonian Mother. None of us could muster up any Estonian, but Mrs Moomin spoke to her in Finnish. And that’s something I didn’t know. That many Estonians understand Finnish, because for years that was their escape from ‘Russian only’ television.

The rest of the ladies concentrated on passing round a couple of battered Swedish crime paperbacks by Mari Jungstedt, and a Swedish DVD, before going gaga over Brian Cox, because he’s so cute… (He wasn’t there, btw. We happened to slip onto the subject of Astrophysics, after which there was no stopping them.)

We were temporarily saved by the aforementioned cheesecake. I’m going to need the recipe.

Science-fantasy?

After I said what I said about science fiction earlier this week, I started thinking. It’s not true that nobody reads sci-fi, and maybe it’s even less true because we aren’t labelling books properly. If they have to be labelled.

We’ve become so keen on fantasy in recent years that it has become the label for anything not totally real. And we may have travelled to the moon and back, but in general space travel isn’t terribly real. That makes it fantasy. Maybe.

It was my use of the clever word dystopia when I reviewed WE by John Dickinson which really set me thinking. Is it only sci-fi when it involves travel through space? Because there’s Oisín McGann’s Small-Minded Giants, for example. Pretty dystopic, if you ask me. Future world (on Earth) where people live in a way totally alien to how we live here and now. And not in a nice futuristic way, either.

Oisín’s book reminds me very much of Julie Bertagna’s Exodus; of where the people fleeing their flooded islands end up. ‘Paradise’ to some maybe, but dystopia to others. Fantasy or sci-fi, or neither?

I always had this theory that the Retired Children’s Librarian dislikes fantasy because she equates it with sci-fi and she equates that with space travel, which to her mind is dreadful. Pippi Longstocking is fantasy, while not having much to do with rockets and interplanetary adventure. And she likes Pippi.

Terry Pratchett said how he fancies himself as a sci-fi writer for a bit, while he reckons his partner-to-be, Stephen Baxter, in their next book venture is a sci-fi writer who quite likes the idea of writing fantasy. It is very close.

So perhaps we need to re-label some fantasy? There’s more to sci-fi than Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov. In fact, how much do the Asimov robots differ from J K Rowling’s characters?

The Resident IT Consultant added his question when we discussed this. Is Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking sci-fi? There are spaceships.

The ALMA prize ceremony 2009

It seems they managed without me. For some years now the witch has been, if not present at the ceremony itself, at least been in the country for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award ceremony at Skansen in Stockholm. It took place yesterday, and if this post seems a tad late in the day for me, it’s because it’s not been all that easy to find pictures and things. Next year they really will have to ask me there, all expenses paid.

Sorry, time to get serious. Because this picture here

shows what the Tamer Institute does these days. After the recent war with Israel, no books are allowed into Palestine at all. So they photocopy what they have. And these grateful people reckon the prize money will keep them going for ten years. It makes you think, doesn’t it?

So from the picture above to the picture below, with representatives from Palestine with Crown princess Victoria at Skansen on yet another lovely summer evening.

I’ll just go and wipe the tears of pride now.

The Bullerby Children

Would Lucy Mangan and I get on if we met, I wonder? We have a lot in common, but we are also very different. For someone so young, Lucy’s Book corner in the Guardian on Saturdays, contains a less predictable selection of much loved books than I’d have thought.

Though the more I read of Lucy’s musings, I can see she is really trying to be me. Hmm. A duel, perhaps?

Why Lucy’s corner has to appear in the Family section is beyond me. No, it isn’t. We must be grateful for anything on books, anywhere. And why should we expect children’s books to be considered literature?

A while back Lucy enthused about Astrid Lindgren’s The Six Bullerby Children, and she appears to have picked the same memories that I would have. The day Lisa moves into her new room has always stuck in my mind. I always wished it could have happened to me.

And every Christmas as I slave away over something or other, I think back to the Bullerby Christmas preparations.

With my background I have also, obviously, seen the Bullerby film, which managed to translate pretty well. My main source for feeling superior, was that the child actors were so ‘soft’ that you could tell how much they winced when walking barefoot home from school. Modern children!

It’s a wonderful piece of nostalgia, and it explains Swedes perfectly; our summers, our Christmasses and our in-betweens. And I did want the grandfather so much.

If Olle really is called Olaf in English, I wonder what the others are called? Can we cope with Lasse and Bosse, or not?