Newspaper Article

Stars dull down kid lit

2003

Overview

INSECURITY about the literary and commercial value of children's books had faded to black. The Guardian noted fiction for young people -- from Winnie the Pooh to Little Women -- had \"colonised\" a third of the BBC's Big Read shortlist of the nation's favourite books. (Not so the ABC's search for the best-loved Australian book, where those for children were less than 10 per cent). The UK bookie's favourite was Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, but C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was second and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was fifth. It also transpired that the extremely adult novelist, Martin Amis, having once declared he would consider writing for children only if he were \"recovering from a serious head injury\", was in fact writing a kids' book, The Scotsman reported. He said it would be \"nothing with a moral. It's about the things that children say.\" Put simply, writers were after bigger sales, having learnt from the example of J.K. Rowling, Britain's top earning woman with a $300 million income last year from her Harry Potter books. Children's book sales in the UK had risen by 22 per cent in the past five years and publishers worldwide were on the hunt for the next Rowling. New York's Alfred A. Knopf may have hit the jackpot with a home-educated teenager called Christopher Paolini whose Eragon blitzed even Rowling on The New York Times bestseller list this year. And \"kidlit\" had become a broad church indeed, including the burgeoning \"young adult\" category as well as all age groups below it.

• Publisher: News Limited
• Subject: Kakutani, Michiko