Hans Christian Andersen Winners 2010
HCA Award Author Winner 2010 --- David Almond - UK
Growing up . . . involves coming to terms with a world in which reality and myth, truth and lies, turn about each other in a creative dance, as they always have and always will.
David Almond
David Almond was born in 1951 in the northeast part of England. The product of a stable, Roman Catholic family, his childhood was marred by the death of an infant sister and the premature death of his father. He draws on these experiences to create the thread that runs through his writing; i.e., life brings us through a succession of contrasts: good and evil, hope and despair, struggle and triumph, wonder and doubt. His books are filled with the language, landscape, and history of northeastern England, a place where real and imaginary characters and real and imaginary places co-exist.
Almond was educated at local schools in Felling and Sunderland and at St. Joseph’s Catholic Grammar School in Hebburn. He studied English and American Literature at the University of East Anglia and worked for some time as a teacher in a primary school in Gateshead. His early work spoke to an adult audience, but with the novel Skellig (1998), he discovered a new audience and a new voice. Skellig is the story of a dirty, homeless creature who is discovered by two children who protect and nurture him. They draw power from each other, allowing each to soar into a world of self-discovery.
Skellig and Almond’s subsequent work have received international acclaim and been the subject of academic study. He has published ten more novels for young people and a children’s play, Wild Girl, Wild Boy. Other novels have been adapted for the stage, TV and film. His characters display youthful imagination and creativity as they actively engage in the natural and social world around them. Adults are depicted as sources of love and stability, but it is the young people who make their own choices and discover who they are themselves.
Almond’s work has a universal resonance and appeal. While grounded in everyday backgrounds and experiences, the characters are drawn to amazing revelations and often to mysterious events or surreal creatures. Almond’s penchant for illustrating truth through contradiction continues to be woven through his stories: melding the personal with the global, making distant terror immediate, and finding hope from despair.
Selected bibliography
Skellig (1998) London: Hodder Children’s Books.
The Fire Eaters (2003) London: Hodder Children’s Books.
Clay (2005) London: Hodder Children’s Books.
Jackdaw Summer (2008) London: Hodder Children’s Books.
The Savage. Illus. by Dave McKean (2008) London: Walker Children’s Books.
Bookbird, 2/2010
***
HCA Award Illustrator Winner 2010 --- Jutta Bauer - Germany
I believe that stories are like vessels. They offer a form, but every reader-- no matter whether young or old-- fills it anew with their experiences and their individual stories.
Jutta Bauer
Born in 1995 in Hamburg, Germany, Jutta Bauer grew up in the town of Volksdorf, near Hamburg. Bauer's father was a schoolteacher and after graduating from the College of Design in Hamburg, she drew a comic strip for the popular woman’s magazine, Brigitte, for seven years, while she began illustrating children's books on the side. After her first books were published in 1981, she worked full-time authoring and illustrating cartoons, textbooks, and picture books. She has also created animated films for which she has received several awards, as well as cartoons for the television program, The Show with the Mouse, which were later published as picture books. Through these experiences, she began to apply herself increasingly to concentration and reduction, paying reverence to the great masters “who simply left more and more out,” like Picasso, Miró, and Klee, thus developing a greater sense of spontaneity in her art.
Mareile Oetken noted, “Bauer’s pictures are always imbued with sincerely felt devotion, humor, and optimism, as well as uncommon humility in the face of the ups and downs and contradictions that life holds. When one takes a closer, attentive look at her picture books, one always gets a feeling for two things: Those things that hold the world together at its innermost core – trust, love, security – or, in short, the threads of hope that she wants to give children through her pictures and picture books, and which is, to her mind, the true purpose of children’s literature; but also, that it is not always possible to resolve such contradictions. Intruding into such scenes of warmth-giving closeness are also other characters who do not seem to belong there: the homeless, the abandoned.”
She favors the media of ink, tempera, colored pencil, and crayon and is known for the simplicity of her style that conveys great feeling through subtle colors and line. Her work has been called “subversive,” “poetic,” and “inventive.” She has authored more than 40 books for children, and her work has been translated into 18 languages.
Jutta Bauer has won awards for her work in books and film, including the Troisdorfer Bilderbuchpreis for Gottfried, das fliegende Schwein, the Prix Danube for Grandpa's Angel, the German Youth Literature Award for Schreimutter, and the Chicago International Children's Film Festival Award for Die Königin der Farben.
Bauer lives with her family in Hamburg.
Selected bibliography
Selma (2003) Geneva: La Joie de Lire Jeunesse.
Die Königin oder Farben (The Queen of Colors) (1998) Weinheim: Beltz & Gelberg.
Schreimutter (The Screaming Mother) (1998) Weinheim: Beltz & Gelberg.
Opa’s Engel (Grandpa's Angel) (L’Ange de grand-père) (2002) Paris: Gallimard Jeunesse.
Aller Anfang (The Very Beginning) By Juerg Schubiger and Franz Hohler (2006) Weinheim: Beltz & Gelberg.
BOOKBIRD, 2/2010
