Tag: Children’s Literature

Opening up the Aidan and Nancy Chambers archive

In 2016, Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books acquired the prestigious archive of Aidan and Nancy Chambers as part of the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Collecting Cultures project. In doing so, it gave a home to one of the most important British children’s literary archives in the country. In this blog post, Newcastle University Research Associate Dr Hazel Sheeky Bird, who is working on opening up new research avenues into the collection, supervised by Dr Lucy Pearson, explains the background to this archive.

Featured image: 10th anniversary of Signal – 1980 Patrick Hardy, Aidan and Nancy Chambers, Lance Salway and Elaine Moss (from left to right)

The range of material held in the Chambers archive is truly impressive, hardly surprising given the contribution that both Aidan and Nancy Chambers have made to the fields of children’s and young adult fiction, literary criticism, publishing and education. Thanks to a grant from the Archives Revealed Scheme (funded by the National Archives and The Pilgrim Trust), research supported by Newcastle University’s Children’s Literature Unit and the ongoing commitment and expertise of the Seven Stories Collection team, the Chambers archive will soon be available for use.

In 1969, Aidan and Nancy Chambers established Signal: Approaches to Children’s Books (1969-2003), one of the first journals dedicated to children’s literary criticism and home to the Signal Poetry Award (1979-2001). Through their own Thimble Press, they also published highly influential works of children’s literary criticism, invaluable guides to the best books for children, and Aidan Chambers’ seminal works of children’s literary criticism (‘The Reader in the Book’ [1977]) and on education (The Reading Environment [1991], Tell Me: Children, Reading and Talk [1993]). Added to this is Aidan Chambers‘ work as editor of ground-breaking YA MacMillan Education imprint, Topliner (1968-1980), his own award-winning ‘Dance Sequence’ of young adult  novels as well as books for younger readers, and his work as editor of Turton & Chambers, an independent publishing house dedicated to publishing books in translations. What becomes clear on delving into the archive is the richness of the material and the wealth of opportunities it offers researchers.

Final cover artwork for Ted van Lieshout’s The Dearest Boy in all the World (1990).

 

Let’s take the Turton & Chambers (T&C) material as a quick example. Beginning in 1989, this was a co-equal venture between David Turton, owner of The Singing Tree children’s bookshop in Perth, Australia and Aidan Chambers: Turton provided the finances and Chambers the editorial expertise. According to T&C’s promotional material, their aim was to ‘publish the rare, the unusual, the extraordinary, the refreshing’ (Company Notice, T&C, Books for Young Readers, Aidan and Nancy Chambers archive, Box A, file 11, p.2.). Books that, for Chambers, allowed readers to ‘extend their range of thinking, their imagination’ (Niki Kallenberg, ‘Features: Publishing the kind of book I wish I’d written’, Scan, 9(3), June 1990, 4-9 [p. 5]) in a way he thought was impossible in their own language. Over the course of three years, T&C published 16 books, mostly prose, translated from French, German, Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch. Many T&C authors, such as Maud Reuterswärd (A Way from Home (1990), Noah is my Name (1991), both translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate, Tormod Haugen (Zeppelin (1990), translated from the Norwegian by David R. Jacobs) and Peter Pohl (Johnny, my friend (1991), translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson), were all award-winning novels either in their country of origin or in Europe. Sometimes stylistically challenging, often unusual and innovative, always thought provoking, the T&C list remains relevant and genuinely engaging for readers of all ages.

Illustration by Tord Nygren for Maud Reuterswärd’s Noah is my Name (Turnton & Chambers, 1990), p. 80.

Aidan Chambers’ correspondence with Anthea Bell, perhaps best known for translating René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s Asterix books, offers fascinating insights into many aspects of their work and lives. Letters illuminate the relationship between translator and editor, the practicalities and realities of working as a translator, and the nuanced and detailed discussions that took place between Chambers and his translators to ensure work of the highest quality. Letters also reveal the warm relationship between Aidan Chambers and Anthea Bell. Writing to Bell on 13th July, 1989, Chambers describes the ‘nerve-wracking’ process of bringing two books to print ‘without the support of a design department’ and comments that despite any resulting shortcomings, ‘at least the books will come from strong personal commitment and extraordinary good will and generosity from those like yourself who have helped with translation and editorial work’ (Box A, file 1).

Happily, the T&C archive has been examined and catalogued as part of a bigger project to fully catalogue the Aidan and Nancy Chambers archive, which will take place over the next 18 months. Work is now underway cataloguing the material for the 100 editions of children’s literature journal Signal, edited by Nancy Chambers. Taking up almost 30 archive storage boxes, the team has begun to weed, process and re-package the material, prior to creating the catalogue. This is a delicate process: a balance has to be found between preserving materials that clearly demonstrate the production processes of the journal with the demands on storage space, the research value of the material, and the ease of use for future researchers. Added to this, is the need to condition check all material prior to re-packaging to ensure that no unwanted substances, i.e. dreaded mould, are transferred into the Collection. All of this adds up to slow and careful work: the weeding process alone will take two months.

The end result will be worth it. Enquiries are already coming in from researchers keen to access the Chambers archive and the team is working hard to get the material ready for them.

Thanks Hazel! We’ll look forward to hearing more about what you’re discovering in the Chambers Collection as your project progresses.

A Place at the Table 2018

On 6th February 2018, thanks to a bursary from CILIP North East, I attended Inclusive Minds’ third annual A Place at the Table event at Penguin Random House in London. A Place at the Table aims to provide a space for the children’s book industry to share best practice around inclusion and diversity and commit to taking practical actions to effect change. In this blog post, I’ll be reflecting on the day and outlining some of the actions that Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books and Newcastle University are taking through the Vital North Partnership…

Author Juno Dawson, in her opening keynote, celebrated how far the publishing industry has come since the first A Place at the Table event in 2016. She mentioned lots of amazing books and authors – from Patrice Lawrence’s prize-winning debut Orangeboy, to Angie Thomas’s bestselling The Hate U Give – and new initiatives like CILIP’s current diversity review of the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Awards. I noted lots of books I want to read – including Juno’s!

Author Juno Dawson opened the A Place at the Table event. Image: Inclusive Minds
Author Juno Dawson opened the A Place at the Table event. Image: Inclusive Minds

Then there were the roundtable and forum discussions, where we discussed barriers to authentic inclusion, and identified ways to shift these. For Seven Stories, the artform of children’s literature is at the heart of everything they do – and it’s by going to events like this that they can flag up with publishers that inclusion is fundamental to the national story they aim to tell. Seven Stories’ workforce (like that of many arts organisations) is not particularly diverse – they’re aiming to shift that barrier through targeted pathways to work programmes from 2018 to 2022.

Highlights of the day for me were hearing from Year 10 pupil Jarvia, one of Inclusive Minds’ Ambassadors, about her reading experiences – she spoke about reading new writing on Wattpad as she feels it’s less filtered – and I loved hearing Jay Hulme’s “angry trans” performance poetry (his description!):

In the afternoon discussions, I ended up sat next to the author, actress and presenter Cerrie Burnell. In her presentation, she talked about how the books she read as a child didn’t reflect her experience. She recounted a story about playing at Peter Pan in the playground: there was already a Wendy and a Tinkerbell, so one of the other children suggested that she could be Captain Hook – Cerrie was adamant that she was more of a Tigerlily. Cerrie encouraged her fellow authors to represent difference in an incidental way: “write the thing that you know, or write the thing that you want to see.”

Robin Stevens, author of the Murder Most Unladylike mysteries, talked about the two types of offence her writing might potentially cause (the one she loses sleep over is making errors about misrepresenting cultures and experiences outside of her own, which is why in her recent books she has been working with sensitivity readers) and Di Airey of Diversity Dynamics reminded us that although publishing is in some ways ahead of other sectors, that we still have a way to go: “There’s not enough change: there are too many people who hide an aspect of their difference.”

Discussion inclusion, equality and diversity at A Place At The Table. Image: Inclusive Minds
Discussion inclusion, equality and diversity at A Place at the Table. Image: Inclusive Minds

I also heard about so many other initiatives and voices over the course of the day through the insights and case studies: from new publishers like Knights Of;  titles including Penny Joelson’s I Have No Secrets and Otter-Barry Books and Pop-Up Projects’ Rising Stars anthology; initiatives like Penguin Random House’s WriteNow programme; prizes like the Amnesty CILIP Honour; accessible events as part of the Southbank Centre’s Imagine Festival. I’m taking lots of ideas and contacts away from the event to follow up on.

It was an inspiring and thought-provoking day, but ensuring the Vital North Partnership’s activities are inclusive is an ongoing process. We’ve done some interesting work, such as our Diverse Voices? symposium in November, and our recent Geographies of Gender and Generation collaboration, and in 2018, we’ll be focussing on BAME voices in children’s literature and activist networks through a new AHRC Creative Economy postdoctoral fellowship led by Dr Aishwarya Subramanian. But there’s still more to do. As Juno said so eloquently in her opening keynote: “The worst thing we can do is think we’ve done it, we’ve achieved diversity. We haven’t done diversity. You can’t tick diversity off the list.”

For more information about A Place at the Table 2018, visit: http://www.inclusiveminds.com/a-place-at-the-table-2018.php