Diversity reforms introduced at Carnegie, Greenaway awards following review

1 October 2018 Books+Publishing

The UK’s Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) has made several changes to the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway awards, following an independently chaired diversity review, reports the Bookseller.

Among the changes CILIP has made to both awards are: opening up the nominations process (currently only open to librarians) to include external nominating bodies, creating a new children’s choice prize, expanding the judging panel to ‘bring in a broader range of perspectives and experiences into the judging process’, providing judges with diversity training, and setting up an equality, diversity and inclusion advisory panel.

CILIP has also created a new mission for the awards—‘To inspire and empower the next generation to create a better world through books and reading’—and will also create a list of eligible books by diverse authors and illustrators to help raise awareness among CILIP members.

As previously reported by Books+Publishing, the 2017 Carnegie Medal longlist attracted criticism for not including a single black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) writer, prompting the independent review.

The review process, which took more than a year, included consultation with over 600 people, including young readers, publishers, authors, illustrators and librarians. The resulting report included 10 recommendations for changes to the awards process, and also revealed the results of a survey of stakeholders in the children’s book sector. The survey found that 19.3% of white respondents and 17.4% of BAME respondents said the biggest barrier to books being nominated for the awards was awareness of the titles involved. In addition, 17% of white respondents said ‘nominator’s awareness of eligible titles’ was a barrier to books being nominated, and 14.6% of BAME respondents said ‘nominator’s bias’ was a problem.

Recent studies in the UK have found that only 8% of YA books published between 2006 and 2016 were by authors of colour, and only 4% of children’s books published in 2017 featured BAME characters.

Category: International news Junior