My favourite awards are the Carnegie- and Newbery Medal for children's literature.
What do you think of book awards?
Which awards are important to you?
My favourite awards are the Carnegie- and Newbery Medal for children's literature.
What do you think of book awards?
Which awards are important to you?
The Carnegie Medal was awarded posthumously for A Monster Calls - Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd. A Brilliant book. Sadly, Dowd died of breast cancer, but I highly recommend her small output of books.
I don't know of other posthumous awards, athough, l'm sure they must be out there.
Emilie, excellent answer. I hope I spelt your name correctly.
It depends on your definitions.
Do you mean:
a) Which award would I most like to win?
El Premio Planeta http://www.premioplaneta.es/ I could do quite a lot with the 601,000€ prize money, the highest for any single novel.
No, I've changed my mind. The Planeta is for novels in Spanish. Wide impact, but not universal. The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award at 5 million SEK (today's conversion 535,422.25€ or £393,375.37). It's truly international AND it's for children's books. Not JUST for authors or illustrators, also eligible are oral storytellers and reading promoters.
b) Which award do I most admire (judging by previous winners)?
The Hans Christian Andersen Award (http://www.ibby.org/254.0.html) or The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.
I can't find a single book in the Carnegie list that wasn't written originally in English.
The Newberry further restricts winners to "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children".
Any children's book prize that wouldn't consider Astrid Lindgren herself, Michael Ende, Maria Gripe, or Hans Baumann has shot itself in the foot, as far as I'm concerned.
c) Did you mean awards for individual books or are awards for lifetime contributions to literature to be considered?
If the former, all of my nominations, except El Planeta, fly out the window. So does the Nobel.
I wasn't aware of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award until I looked her name up on wikipedia (in order to reply to this Q.) to see which awards SHE'd won. I'm particularly impressed by the following condition:
Astrid Lindgren argued in favour of peace and democracy and against all forms of violence. She participated in social debate in speeches and in newspaper articles. Her deeply humanist spirit also permeates her books. The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award is presented to people and organisations working in her tradition safeguarding democratic values.
So that excludes Tolkien then. (Heh heh, it's not awarded posthumously anyway.) And probably Rowling.
The more I read about this prize, the more I want it!
So, back to definitions:
If restricted to prizes awarded for individual books, I'll go with El Planeta.
If not, it's The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for me. Before today, I would have said the Andersen.