Harry-Mania
HARRY-MANIA struck England last month; many bookstore
staffers and customers donned wizard costumes to celebrate

With three children's titles firmly fixed on adult bestseller lists and escalating concern over childhood literacy rates, the attention of the nation has been turned to children's books as never before. Government initiatives to raise standards of literacy in schools, programs initiated during the National Year of Reading, the announcement of the first Children's Laureate and, above all, the runaway success of the Harry Potter titles all indicate that the current focus on children's books is likely to continue during the coming seasons.

The Reign of Harry Potter

"At 3:45 this afternoon a hush will descend upon the nation's playgrounds. Footballs will litter the streets.... Abandoned Tamagochi will perish unmourned." So began the lead opinion column in the Times on July 8, under the headline "Pottering Along." Other papers followed suit, with Harry Potter featured in cartoon strips, business news and in front-page pictures of queues around the block, as children dashed to buy J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

The first children's book to be subjected to the stringent embargo conditions familiar to adult books -- and a marketing campaign to match -- Harry Potter has put children's books center stage in national news. Unseating Hannibal Lecter from atop the bestseller lists, Prisoner of Azkaban became the fastest-selling novel in recent U.K. history.

The phenomenal sales of Rowling's three books and the author's own story -- of being an impoverished single mother struggling to write with one hand in a cafe while rocking her baby with the other -- have quickly become part of publishing history. Rowling has proved that she is a consummate storyteller with a vivid imagination and an appealing sense of humor, and reviews of Prisoner of Azkaban have by and large been quite laudatory.

All this is excellent news for Rowling and her publisher, Bloomsbury, but it has had a much wider impact, too. It has raised the profile of all children's books, showing them in an extremely positive light and silencing criticisms about the dearth of good contemporary writing.

New Award Winners

Hot on the heels of a news week devoted to Harry Potter came the awarding of the Library Association's Carnegie and Greenaway Medals -- with Rowling's name conspicuous by its absence (so conspicuous that the LA had a prepared statement justifying its absence on the grounds that "other books fulfilled the criteria better"). Instead, the librarians chose another extremely popular title, Skellig by David Almond (Hodder Children's Books), as the Carnegie winner. A first novel, Skellig has already won the Whitbread Prize and has been shortlisted for the Guardian children's book award, among others. Highly commended for the medal were Fly, Cherokee, Fly by Chris d'Lacey (Transworld) and Her s by Robert Cormier (Hamish Hamilton).

The Greenaway Medal was awarded to Helen Cooper for Pumpkin Soup (Transworld). Her second win in three years, the award confirms this self-taught illustrator as one of the most accomplished writer/illustrators in the field. Both Jane Simmons's Come On, Daisy! (Orchard) and Shirley Hughes's The Lion & the Unicorn (Bodley Head) were highly commended.

National Year of Reading

As the National Year of Reading draws to a close, its halfway results have just been published, and very impressive they are, too. Widely supported by major corporations as well as the government, the NYR has facilitated organizations as diverse as banks, city councils, McDonald's, football clubs, prisons and TV shows to promote reading as both fun and a vital life skill.

The impact of NYR has been hugely significant, reaching into places where reading and books are not usually discussed. Ongoing campaigns like themed months concentrating on different kinds of reading -- p try, drama, screen reads (books in other media, such as film or TV) -- and widespread support by celebrities from a range of fields has kept up the enthusiasm for reading that is essential if national literacy standards are to be effectively addressed.

In the book trade itself the response to NYR has been patchy. While many companies -- including Random House, Transworld, Penguin, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Waterstones -- saw NYR as an opportunity to broaden their links with the community, others were remarkably reluctant to take up the challenge. NYR's project director Liz Attenborough commented, "The publishers and booksellers who got enthusiastically behind NYR found new opportunities for involvement in the wider reading community. As the project will be continuing we hope that those who didn't join initially will still find opportunities to get on board."

The success of NYR has attracted interest from around the world. The Hungarian Publishers and Booksellers Association in collaboration with the government is launching a National Year of Reading campaign in 2000 that will be closely modeled on the U.K.

Pumpkin Soup and Skellig
THIS YEAR'S Carnegie (l.) and
Greenaway winners

example. New Zealand, Australia, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Peru and many European countries have all expressed interest in what the Year of Reading has achieved.

As the Year draws officially to its close, it is clear that there is widespread enthusiasm for an ongoing campaign. Under the logo Read On: National Reading Campaign, the government and the National Literacy Trust are continuing to support individual, locally funded initiatives. Many of the projects begun under the NYR, like the Reader-in-Residence at the Holloway prison for women and the Ford Motor Company's Dads and Lads, will continue to operate.

On the Move

Sue Tarsky has joined the international publishing division of BBC Worldwide as children's editorial director, a new position. She will be responsible for developing and commissioning the core publishing that will accompany the range of BBC's children's characters, such as the Teletubbies, the Tweenies and Rotten Ralph.

Ingrid Selberg has left HIT Entertainment, where she has been managing director of the publishing arm for just over a year, to join Pleasant Company. As vice-president, managing director and publisher she will take on the international development of the American Girl Collection. Selberg will launch the company, now a subsidiary of Mattel, in the U.K. in 2001 and in France and Germany in 2002. Based in London, she plans to create three new "girls" for each market, adopting the U.S. marketing model of catalogue and e-commerce for the dolls and regular book distribution for the books.

David Bennett has departed David Bennett Books, the company he founded in 1993, halfway through his two-year contract with Collins & Brown, which bought him out last year. Still unsure of what he will do next, he is currently working on a range of projects that may lead to further publishing ventures or into films.

Henrietta Branford

Henrietta Branford, author of the Guardian Award -- winning Fire, Bed and Bone, among other titles, died of cancer on April 30 at age 53. Her writing career was brief but remarkably fruitful. Her first book, Royal Blunder, was published when she was 40, after she had begun to raise a family and had held several other jobs. Success came swiftly when she won a Smarties Prize for Dimanche Diller, the story of a gutsy girl who copes with life on her own after the death of her parents. Two other Dimanche Diller stories followed before Branford moved into writing longer and more taxing tales like The Fated Sky, the story of a Viking heroine set against the bleak violence of her times, and the wholly originalFire, Bed and Bone, a novel set in medieval England that tells of the peasants' fight for freedom through the eyes of an old hunting dog.