The award of the pound;25,000 Whitbread Book of the Year prize to Philip Pullman confirms that children’s literature is no longer in the pint-sized league.
Pullman, receiving the award for The Amber Spyglass - the final novel in the His Dark Materials trilogy - said: “Thank you for showing that children’s books belong with the rest.”
He withheld the first two books in the trilogy from consideration for the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year award (worth pound;5,000) because the winning children’s book was not eligible for the overall prize.
Whitbread changed the rules two years ago, leading to a battle between Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, with Beowulf beating the wizard by a narrow margin.
Pullman generally attracts more solid critical acclaim than JK Rowling and the first Dark Materials novel, Northern Lights, made it as a crossover book - one which an adult unaccompanied by a child was willing to read in public - before the Harry Potter stories.
The whole-hearted cheers at the awards presentation this week, suggest that most of the assembled literati agreed with Pullman’s publisher, David Fickling, when he said: “This is wonderful - it’s so well-deserved.”
Pullman, 55, wrote a string of moderately-successful novels (including the series of Sally Lockhart historical mysteries such as The Ruby in the Smoke) while teaching and lecturing, for some years on teacher training courses at Westminster College, Oxford.
The wider success of Northern Lights, which won the Carnegie Medal and netted an American publishing deal, helped him become a full-time writer. He remains the teacher’s friend (“give the teachers the books and let them do the job”, he appealed at the Carnegie awards ceremony for Northern Lights).
