Prize ceremonies with absent winners are not the easiest thing to handle. But they also say something about the expectations of those up for the prize.
When Mal Peet published his second children's novel last October, it never occurred to him that, as a result, he would need to keep July 7 - the day on which the winner of the CILIP Carnegie Medal, the librarians' award for the best children's book of the year, is announced - free.
Tamar (Walker Books) is a cleverly constructed crossover novel about the ways in which something that happened during the second world war shaped the life of a young girl. Peet is the author of only one previous novel, Keeper. Although it was highly praised (especially by Jan Mark in the Guardian Review), he doesn't have the kind of track record that made him look a cert even for the shortlist of an award that boasts previous winners including CS Lewis and Philip Pullman.
At some point, therefore, Peet went ahead and booked a holiday. And it wasn't a small one: he took off to Canada for a long stay away with old friends. The librarians are thought to be a conservative bunch, fond of 'safe' recommendations - although they did give their medal to Melvin Burgess's controversial Junk in 1997 - and, since Peet was the only nominee not to have carried off the prize before, he can be forgiven for thinking that he was safe to be out of the country. Not so. Win Peet did, and he deserves many congratulations for doing so. Despite his absence, he used the opportunity to urge President Bush and prime minister Blair to read Jonathan Swift's The Battle of the Books. "It has a great deal to say about the 'collateral damage' that is incurred when violence is used in a battle over the printed word," he said. "They might also discover that when it comes to struggling with fundamentalism, there are arsenals packed with weapons of mass education in all our towns and cities. They are called libraries."
