Kids' First: Children's Writer Pullman Wins Whitbread Prize

By Julia Eccleshare, PW Daily for Booksellers -- Publishers Weekly, 1/23/2002

Philip Pullman is the first children's author to win the Whitbread Book of the Year award, for The Amber Spyglass (Scholastic), the third part of his epic trilogy His Dark Materials.

Pullman also won Whitbread Children's Award, which put him in the running for the Book of the Year Award. His competition for the Book of the Year Award consisted of the winners of Whitbread's Novel Award, Poetry Award, Biography Award and First Novel Award. The awards were announced Tuesday evening in London.

Chairman of the judges Jon Snow said, "Pullman is in a league of his own. This is indeed a remarkable moment when a children's book has swept the board." He admitted that there had originally been doubts about the £25,000 prize going to a children's book, but the overwhelming quality of Pullman's story swayed the jury.

In previous years, children's books have failed to win the overall prize--most notably when J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was hotly tipped but lost out to Seamus Heaney's Beowulf. Pullman himself has long argued that children's books could--and should--be judged on equal terms with their adult counterparts, a point he emphasized on receiving the award. "I'm thrilled to win, but winning or not winning is not the point," he said. "The point is that children's books are seen to be on the same level as the other categories--where they belong."

A win for The Amber Spyglass was heavily predicted after Ian McEwan's Atonement (Doubleday) had controversially failed to win the Novel Award, having also missed out on the Booker Prize last October. Betting on The Amber Spyglass reached such a pitch that bookmakers William Hill closed its book on Friday in the wake of some heavy bets.

Other category winners were: Novel Award: Twelve Bar Blues by Patrick Neate (Viking); First Novel Award: Something Like a House by Sid Smith (Picador); Poetry Award: Bunny by Selima Hill (Bloodaxe); and Biography Award, Selkirk's Island by Diana Souhami (Weidenfeld and Nicholson).

This article originally appeared in the January 23, 2002 issue of PW Daily for Booksellers. For more information about PW Daily, including a sample and subscription information, click here.