The CLiPPA Awards by Head Judge Chris Riddell
The winner of the CLiPPA, CLPE Children’s Poetry Award, was announced on Monday 10 July at a live poetry show on the Lyttleton stage of the National Theatre. US poets Ted Kooser and Connie Wanek were named winners for their collection of poems inspired by nature, Marshmallow Clouds(Walker Books), illustrated by Richard Jones. In a year of outstanding poetry publishing for children, Nicola Davies is Highly Commended for her moving sequence of poems about the refugee experience, Choose Love (Graffeg) illustrated by Petr Horáček.
Chair of the CLiPPA judges, former Children’s Laureate illustrator Chris Riddell shares his experience of the CLiPPAand explains what makes it such a special award.
I have been involved with the CLiPPA for about eight years, starting just before I became Children’s Laureate in 2015. Each year I turn up with a document camera and draw live as the shortlisted poets perform their work. I love the way CLPEhas designed the awards to be inclusive, inviting schools to take part in a shadowing scheme and then to attend the awardceremony, as winning shadowing schools and poets perform poems from the shortlisted collections. It is a direct link from the poets to the classroom as well as being a lot of fun. My favourite part of the CLiPPA is always the children’s performances.
I am not a poet but, like many of the children that CLPE reaches with the prize, I enjoy writing poems. I also love compiling anthologies of my favourite poems and illustrating them. Unlike prose, poetry goes straight to the heart of the matter and crystalises memory, emotion and observation into bright memorable words. The best poetry provokes an emotional response and children are especially receptive.
The winner of this year’s CLiPPA, Marshmallow Clouds by Ted Kooser and Connie Wanek, and the Highly Commended, Choose Love by Nicola Davies are both beautifully illustrated and produced books. We live in an age of high-qualityproduction and printing, and children’s poetry books can often be amongst the most beautiful. Both books have wonderful but very different illustrations. As an illustrator, I love the way words and pictures work together on the page and poetry invites the illustrator to interpret the sense of the words in ways that don’t have to be literal. Both Richard Jones in his stunning compositions for Marshmallow Clouds and Petr Horačék with his painterly abstracts in Choose Love show how illustrations can make poems blossom in the reader’s mind.
It was an honour to chair the judging panel for this year’sCLiPPA. My job was to create an atmosphere in which my fellow judges (poet Valerie Bloom, Jay Bhadricha of the Forward Arts Foundation, writer Indigo Williams and Charlotte Hacking Learning Programme Director at CLPE)felt happy to express their opinions and respond to other points of view. There was a lot of laughter as well as some heartfelt analysis and I’m very proud that our decisions on the shortlist and the winners were unanimous.
The award ceremony was joyful with a full theatre at the National of excited poetry loving children and teachers. My favourite moment was the first performance: six-year-old Darci reciting ‘Uplifting’, one of the poems in Joseph Coelho’s collection Blow a Kiss, Catch a Kiss, and the excited hug she gave Joe at the end of the ceremony as their photograph was taken.
The CLiPPA is marking its 20th anniversary and the role these awards play has never been more vital. If children’s poetry isn’t championed and taken into our schools, crowded curriculums and unimaginative politicians will blight creativity in our young people. My advice to those young people is to seek out poetry and poets and to write poems yourselves. As I said in the poem I read at this year’s CLiPPA, “If you want to slay dragons, make art”.