CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

Here is the last of the Printz Award speeches, and the biggie: Melina Marchetta’s acceptance speech for winning the 2009 Michael L. Printz Award for [On the] Jellicoe Road, courtesy of BookList Online and YALSA.

Our other posts about this award, including links to other 2009 acceptance speeches, can be found here.

The video is up. Here. At last! Only Melina to go now.

(Or, to put into context – Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels was a Printz Honor Book at the ALA Awards. Here is her acceptance speech. We seem to have been waiting forever to see it, even though we have been able to read it for a while.)

This time it’s E. Lockhart for The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, which was a Printz Honor Book in 2009. Although we have been hearing about this title for a long time, it inexplicably has not been released in Australia.

Lockhart’s speech, in which she discusses the influences that shaped the novel, can be viewed here. And as we can’t bring you a local review, here’s one from the New York Times. Sounds good – any Australian publishers interested? For all we know it might already be in the pipeline.

There will be another Printz speech soon – the only ones remaining are the vision of speeches by Margo and Melina. We’ll let you know – about a fortnight to wait for the first of these, we’re guessing.

Listen to what Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) has to say about growing up with English and American children’s books.

Thought-provoking, indeed. Who is being excluded from our literature?