Neil Gaiman wins Newbery Medal

Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Anansi Boys) has won the John Newbery medal, one of the most prestigious awards for children’s literature in the U.S.

Mr. Gaiman, 48, won for The Graveyard Book, a story about a boy who is raised in a cemetery by ghosts after his family is killed in the opening pages of the novel. In announcing the winner of what is widely considered the most prestigious honor in children’s literature, the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, cited Mr. Gaiman’s work for its “delicious mix of murder, fantasy, humor and human longing,” noting its “magical, haunting prose.”

Gaiman says idea for The Graveyard Book was inspired, in part, by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book — though the main characters in the novel are of the supernatural variety: vampires, witches, and werewolves (oh, my).

Major U.S. book awards announced

The nominations for the U.S. National Book Critics Circle award were announced last weekend, and, as always, a few big names were snubbed in the fiction category, most notably Thomas Pynchon. The fiction list was also noteworthy in that none of the 2006 National Book Award nominees – including the eventual winner, Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker – were included.

Two of the nominations went to relative newcomers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf), and Kiran Desai for her Man Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic, and Penguin here in Canada). The other nominations went to three authors already ensconced at the top of the American literary scene: Dave Eggers, for his tale of a refugee from the Sudanese civil war, What Is the What (McSweeney’s), Richard Ford, for the third installment in his Frank Bascombe series, The Lay of the Land (Knopf), and Cormac McCarthy, for his post-apocalyptic tale The Road (Knopf).

Just a day after the Book Critics Circle announced their nominations (the full list of which can be seen here), the American Library Association announced the winners of their annual Newbery and Caldecott awards for children’s literature.

The Newbery Medal, for a work of prose fiction, went to a surprise winner: the relatively untouted The Higher Power of Lucky (Simon & Schuster), by Susan Patron, about a motherless girl in a small California town. Meanwhile the Caldecott Medal, for picture books, went to illustrator David Wiesner for his wordless tale Flotsam (Clarion), about a boy who finds an underwater camera at the beach. The award makes Wiesner a three-time Caldecott winner: he won for Tuesday in 1991, and for The Three Pigs in 2001.