DFB did brilliantly at the Sheffield Children’s Book Award yesterday!

Huge congratulations to Giles Andreae and Sarah McIntyre, who won the Best Picture Book category for the truly disgusting Morris the Mankiest Monster, and to Mark Haddon who won the Shorter Novel category for his explosive Boom!

And as if that wasn’t enough, Morris the Mankiest Monster then went on to scoop the Overall Winner prize!

This is a huge award, and our favourite kind – the winners are chosen by children, not grown-ups. Over 200 schools voted, and there were a thousand children present at yesterday’s awards ceremony in City Hall, Sheffield.

Check out Sarah McIntyre’s blog for her very funny account of the event and some great pics.

……Introducing our first author blog on the DFB website! Jeremy de Quidt, author of the  fantastical, blood-curdling debut novel The Toymaker has posted for you all below -  the first in a series of guest blogs from DFB writers and illustrators. Hurrah! This sparkling post really tickled me, as they always do (if you haven’t read Jeremy’s previous posts, take a look at his author page). From now on, we’ll be asking a different author every month to post a blog on our website – so keep an eye out for glimpses of your favourite illustrators and storytellers!

…then all of a sudden they zip past. I looked out of the window yesterday and realized that it was almost Christmas. Actually, it wasn’t so much the looking out of the window that did it, it was the annual arrival of the mice.

Each year at about this time, we start to get mice in the house. Where they come from I don’t know, but I think they’re here for the presents and chocolate. One year they neatly trimmed off the gold paper wrapping from all the chocolate coins and took tooth size scrapes out of each one. Another year they chewed through an electricity cable and left us without lights for ages while we tried to track down where the damage had been done. We eventually found the culprit turned victim beneath the floorboards, its teeth, in death as in life, firmly clamped into the power cable.

But I’m soft hearted when it comes to mice. They’re just doing their best.

So when Alice announced that she’d heard one under her bed the other day, we laid out the trusty and well tried traps – not the ‘put your head here and it gets chopped off by a steel spring’ variety, but the ‘catch you in a box and let you go somewhere else’ variety. I’m convinced that the mice we let go are the same ones as come back, but there you go. The way these traps work best is for you to wait until morning, and if the trap is closed, you lift it to your ear and listen very carefully for the scratching sounds inside. What you don’t do is what Alice did. You don’t get up in the pitch dark and armed with a torch open the trap to see if there’s a mouse inside. If you do that the mouse pegs it for all it’s worth and you don’t catch it again for days.

But we did get him in the end, and he is probably even now slowly making his way back. I reckon another week and we’ll have to evict him again.

So, the year has moved on, and this is the view from my window as I look out today.

Alice has been getting on with the world atlas across the kitchen wall, but it has come to halt recently what with exams and school plays and the like. This is where she has got to.

And the post brought the original artwork of the German cover to The Toymaker. The artist, Betina Gotzen-Beek, very kindly sent it to me as a present, along with sketches to show how she had started, which was really nice of her. This is it propped up on my laptop.

All of which brings me to now – summer has been and gone, Christmas is in the offing, and at long last I have nearly finished the next story. Maybe by the end of the year I will have it done.

Now, that would be very nice. I might even read it to the mice.

‘This is a riveting adventure of three boys who have nothing, attempting to fulfill a dead man’s last altruistic wish. Their success rides on their ability to outsmart and out run the police. With the odds against them they band together forging a future from the trash.’  (Cecie O’Bryon England’s review of TRASH  for The Washington Times)

If you haven’t yet read TRASH  – get to it!!

 TRASH  is reverberating around the globe at the moment, and it’s music to our ears listening to all the fantastic reviews and nominations the book has received! Here are just a few tit bits from our TRASH stash :

For starters, check out Andy Mulligan’s brilliant new website – click here to have a look! 

• Winners, with the best Independant Booksellers’ window display of TRASH - ‘THE BOOK NOOK’ in Hove!!

• An interview with Andy Mulligan from Alex Riley’s ‘Lit Blog’

• TRASH  has been chosen for the Winter 2010-2011 Kids’ Indie Next List (“Inspired Recommendations for Kids from Indie Booksellers”) – woohoo!

• TRASH  has it’s very own facebook page – become a fan!

• TRASH  has been included in the School Library Journal “Best Books of the Year” list (check out their review here).

Have a brilliant weekend!

Congrats to D.M. Cornish, whose final instalment of the Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy is published this month. 

And don’t they make a handsome trio?

D.M is the ultimate world-maker, and children, and adults too, will find themselves completely immersed in his Half-Continent, a land that bears the scars of centuries of conflict between monsters and men. Here monsters of every variety roam, and even the smallest can kill a human quicker than thought.

This breathtaking final volume has everything D.M’s fans have come to expect – action, adventure, incredible creatures and fascinating characters. And if you haven’t read the first two, then you should! Enter the world of the Half-Continent, and don’t forget your hat…