Point Blanc, Horowitz’s second Alex Rider spy adventure, has topped an online poll in the first Askews Children’s Book Award, with 28 per cent of the vote (1,626 pupils voted in all). Second is Grandma, You’re Dead by Sharon O Tai, a ghost story set in the Caribbean, and third is Simone’s Diary by Helena Pielichaty, chronicling the chatty Simone’s move to secondary school.

Askews, the Lancashire-based teachers’ books supplier, set up the award for fiction for nine to 12-year-olds with support from The TES last autumn. Staff at Hollins high school, a city technology college in Accrington, Lancashire, found that pupils’ enthusiasm for books was boosted so much during the awards process that four reading groups were set up.

Shortlists are announced today for the libraries’ top children’s book awards, the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals. The Carnegie shortlist (for authors) bypasses the most hyped novels of last year, Melvin Burgess’s Lady: my life as a bitch and Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl. The Kate Greenaway shortlist (for illustrators) has some surprising omissions: Raymond Briggs’s Ug, P J Lynch’s Ignis and Shirley Hughes’s Alfie Weather have all missed out.

See www.ckg.org.ukshadowing for details of how your school can shadow the judges. For more details of the Askews award, see the website www.askews.co.uk

MEDAL AWARD SHORTLISTS

Carnegie Medal for authors

Love that Dog

by Sharon Creech

The Ropemaker

by Peter Dickinson

Journey to the River Sea

by Eva Ibbotson

Jake’s Tower

by Elizabeth Laird

The Kite Rider, andStop the Train

by Geraldine McCaughrean

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents

by Terry Pratchett

True Believer by Virginia Euwer Wolff

Kate Greenaway Medal for

illustrators

Fix-it Duck,

by Jez Alborough

Silver Shoes,

by Caroline Binch

Sometimes I Like to Curl Up in a Ball

by Charles Fuge

The Witch’s

Childrenby Russell Ayto

Katje the Windmill Cat

by Nicola Bayley

Tatty Ratty

by Helen Cooper

Let’s Get a Pup!

by Bob Graham

Pirate Diary

by Chris Riddell