Published on March 27th
For a long time now, the re-telling of myths and legends has been considered the provenance of children's books. Do you remember Barbara Leonie Picard and Roger Lancelyn Greene, with their Greek and Roman and Norse myths? And there was Rosemary Sutcliff with her Beowulf, Arthurian trilogy and Irish myths. OUP put out a wonderfully comprehensive myths and legends series and there have been recent excellent re-tellings, like Kevin Crossley-Holland's Norse Myths and Penelope Lively's Black Ships Before Troy and Aeneid as well as Adele Geras's two novels based on Homer....
Longlists, shortlists and announcements of winners.
Moves, mergers, and all the rest of the industry news.
by Gill Vickery.
[Note: When this issue was first made live there was a problem with the links in the news section. This has now been fixed. Thanks to Linda Newbery for alerting us to this problem. ~ WebEd]
Stravaganza: City of Flowers by Mary Hoffman was published by Bloomsbury in paperback on 6th March 2006
Last year I went to a very interesting session given by fantasy-writer Katherine Roberts at an SAS retreat in Charney Bassett. She'd called it Measuring Success and she gave us various criteria for doing it. For publishers and writers some of the criteria were the same: we'd both be happy about good sales figures, reviews, film deals etc. But then there were other measures which affected writers alone, like PLR figures, which publishers don't see, fanmail (ditto) and the satisfaction and enjoyment of writing the book...
In a myth of the Akimel O'odham (Pima) of the American southwest, the god Buzzard creates a whole miniature world, with a sun, moon and stars, just like our world. Each myth is like this miniature cosmos of Buzzard's, containing a whole world of meanings in infinite recession.
Which children's books would make good films? And are these the ones that actually do make it on to the screen? In the light of the success of the Harry Potter films, the Lord of the Rings and now Narnia, hardly a week goes by without the news that film rights have been optioned in a children's book title.