Tag: Andrea Reece

CLiPPA Poetry Award

Andrea Reece: The CLiPPA, Proving Poetry is a Must For Every Child

After a two-year absence, the CLiPPA, CLPE Children’s Poetry Award, stormed into the South Bank on 8 July, filling the Queen Elizabeth Hall with children’s poetry, children’s poets, and children. Even compared to previous CLiPPA ceremonies, the 2022 award had a special momentum; this wasn’t the first celebration of the year, but the third.

CLiPPA Shortlisted poets, Manjeet Mann, Laura Mucha, Kate Wakeling, compère Nikita Gill, Matt Goodfellow, Liz Brownlee and Valerie Bloom, with children who performed last year’s CLiPPA Poems. Image: Poppie Skold

The excitement began in May with the announcement of the shortlist at the Manchester Poetry Library at Manchester Metropolitan University, hosted by Kaye Tew and Becky Swain. Four of the six shortlisted poets took part, Valerie Bloom, Matt Goodfellow, Laura Mucha, and Kate Wakeling.

Valerie Bloom, Manchester Poetry Library at Manchester Metropolitan University. Image: Mike Frisbee

They were joined by classes of children from local schools, who had been reading the shortlisted collections and were partisan in their championing of their favourites. Here’s Poyvaz of Lily Lane Primary School summing up Being Me by Liz Brownlee, Matt Goodfellow and Laura Mucha perfectly, ‘I think this book should get an award because it is thought-inducing and it opens your eyes to the people around you. This book gives a voice to the people who don’t have a voice.’ Louise Fazackerley, Poet-in-Residence at Lily Lane, explains just what a special event it was, ‘The children were enthralled by the words of the world-class poets at this event.  They loved visiting the university and feeling that their opinions about books are important.  We saw the confidence of the children grow as they took their place onstage, just like their writing heroes.’ 

CLiPPA shortlisted poets: Laura Mucha, Manjeet Mann, Matt Goodfellow, Kate Wakeling, Valerie Bloom, Liz Brownlee (and Paddy, assistance dog). Image: Poppie Skold

From Manchester, next stop was The Globe in June, a CLiPPA showcase for the Poetry By Heart finals. All six shortlisted poets were able to take part, Liz Brownlee and Manjeet Mann joining Valerie, Matt, Laura and Kate. There too, of course, children were at the heart of the programme, ten-year-old Alfie giving a solo performance of Water from Michael Rosen’s 2021 CLiPPA-winner, On the Move,

Alfie, who performed from Michael Rosen’s 2021 CLiPPA winning On the Move, Walker Books.
Image: Sam Strickland

and eight-year-olds Jozef, Giulia and Muneef from Swaffield Primary School, Wandsworth giving a spirited performance of Cheers from Matt Goodfellow’s Bright Bursts of Colour. Swaffield are Shadowing regulars, teacher Jean Bennett says, ‘Our whole school waits in anticipation for the Shadowing scheme to be launched. There is a buzz of energy from Years 1 – 6, every class wanting their representatives to be selected.’

Jozef, Giulia and Muneef, Swaffield Primary School, performing from Matt Goodfellow’s CLIPPA 2021 shortlisted Bright Bursts of Colour, Otter-Barry Books. Image: Sam Strickland

And then on 8 July the CLiPPA rolled into the Queen Elizabeth Hall, bringing old and new friends together. Valerie, Liz, Matt, Manjeet, Laura and Kate were joined by Michael Rosen as show host. Chris Riddell returned to take up his pen and live-draw proceedings. Excitement levels rose as the Shadowing winners arrived, including the entire Reception year from Churchend Primary Academy, Tilehurst, who would wow the audience with their performance of Caterpillar Cake, title poem in Matt Goodfellow’s shortlisted collection; and eight students from Levenshulme High School, Manchester, stars of the shortlist event, who moved many to tears with their sensitive interpretation of 336 Days Before from Manjeet Mann’s The Crossing. An audience of 800 watched in person, while across the country, schools were glued to the livestream – CLPE estimate as many as 9,000 viewers in total.

Valerie Bloom, winner of the CLiPPA 2022 Poetry Prize for Stars with Flaming Tails, Otter-Barry Books. Image: Ellie Kurttz

That party that began in March in Manchester finally ended with huge, joyful applause for Valerie Bloom, announced as winner of the 2022 CLiPPA for her collection Stars with Flaming Tails, described by Philip Gross as ‘poetry that can go anywhere’. (Isaac in Manchester will be pleased, he made a strong case for Valerie being ‘one of the greatest poets in history’). Except we all know that’s not the end, because the experience of taking part, of reading poetry, learning poetry, and writing their own poetry, will enrich the lives of all the thousands of CLiPPA participants for ever.

Valerie Bloom with her winning book Stars with Flaming Tails and some starstruck poetry performers. Image: Ellie Kurttz

Andrea Reece

Andrea Reece worked as publicist on the CLiPPA 2022. She is editor of Books for Keeps, she reviews for Lovereading4kids and is director of the children’s programme of the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival. She runs the Klaus Flugge Prize and also works on the Branford Boase Award.

Books for Keeps

Andrea Reece: Everyone’s a Winner

Everyone’s a winner

The Newbery Award is one hundred years old this year. Reading an article about the award and its 100 winners got me thinking about prizes, their importance and impact. I should say that prizes have been a big part of my professional life (though, sadly, not as a recipient). Publishers I’ve worked for have sponsored prizes; authors I’ve published have won them. I’ve been a judge myself (Costa Children’s Book Award 2015 – a big year). I’ve been part of the team behind the Branford Boase Award since 2012 and am currently running the Klaus Flugge Prize. And, most pertinent here, I’m delighted to say that this will be my third year working for CLPE on the publicity and promotion for the CLiPPA, the UK’s leading annual award for published poetry for children. Put it all together, and that’s a lot of judging sessions observed, and a great deal of applauding, not to mention lots of opportunities to ponder who prizes are for, and what they can do.

The Newbery anniversary has sparked debate around the list of winners and not all of its 100 winning books are recommended reading for today. Times change, taste and sensibilities with them of course, but it’s true too that anyone who’s participated in an award will be conscious of excellent nominees who, because of some one thing, failed to make the final list. Then too, if there can only be one winner, surely there must be four or five disappointed shortlistees too.

Well, no. Because to see a prize as only being about its winner really misses the point. As an expert, here are five glorious things I’ve realised are true of all prizes.

  1. The judges. Every literary prize I’ve ever observed (and this is particularly true of the CLiPPA) had as its panel of judges a group of informed, enthusiastic and engaged people, ready to share their opinions honestly, to listen to their fellow judges, and to determine the very best qualities in each collection they were considering.
  2. That excitement and passion is then shared with the public, bringing a whole new audience to books, poetry collections and poems that they would not otherwise have discovered.
  3. The best shortlists – and again, this is particularly true of the CLiPPA but it’s also true of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prizes – do more than just showcase what is on the list. They highlight exactly what is happening in the field at the time, new and important developments, what is exciting the best practitioners of the moment. How cheering it is for example to see Manjeet Mann’s verse novel The Crossing on the shortlist for this year’s Costa Book Award, and then to see it win the category – the first time in the award’s history that the children’s prize has gone to a verse novel.
  4. No matter how often we think that surely everything there is to say or think has been said, thought or described, prizes put the spotlight on new and original work, reminding us all of the boundless capacity of human imagination.
  5. And finally, the celebrations are for everyone. Michael Rosen was named winner of the 2021 CLiPPA but on the day of the announcement, didn’t it feel as though everyone was talking about children’s poetry? How glorious was that!

Even as I write this, submissions are coming in for the 2022 CLiPPA – publishers, there’s still time if you have yet to put your books forward – and entries are also pouring in for the much-loved CLiPPA Shadowing, the scheme that prompts poetry performances in schools up and down the country. I can’t wait to share the announcement of this year’s shortlist and the celebrations of the very best new poetry books for children.

Andrea Reece

Andrea Reece is Managing Editor of Books for Keeps and reviews editor for Lovereading4Kids. She’s also director of the Children’s Programme for the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival. As administrator and publicist for prizes the CLiPPA, Branford Boase Award and Klaus Flugge Prize, she knows how to keep a secret and enforce an embargo. 

CLiPPA Poetry Award

Andrea Reece: Celebrating the CLiPPA 2021

Celebrating the CLiPPA 2021

Is there any prize more joyful than the CLiPPA? The CLiPPA highlights the best new poetry for children and, through the Shadowing Scheme, allows schools and children to get up close to the collections on the shortlist, turning thousands into lifelong poetry fans.

The celebrations for this year’s shortlist announcement were particularly exciting, even for the CLiPPA, a prize that regularly takes over the National Theatre. The five books were announced live on stage at The Globe, part of a day of magnificent poetry performances for this year’s Poetry By Heart project. Congratulations to Tim Shortis and Julie Blake for creating the event and delivering it so successfully.

Before the shortlist announcement, the audience was treated to performances from two of the winning schools in the 2020 CLiPPA Shadowing Scheme. First up were ten-year-olds Freddie and Zane from Swaffield Primary School, Wandsworth with their lively recitation of the poem Brother and Sister by Lewis Carroll, which appears in A. F. Harrold’s collection Midnight Feasts. (Both boys, incidentally, claim they thoroughly approve of the poem’s concluding moral: ‘Never stew your sister’.) Then, with a ‘Boom-ba-da-Boom!’ seven-year-old Benji from Norwich Road Academy, Thetford performed Fireworks by Anna E. Jordan, which features in The Proper Way to Meet a Hedgehog, edited by Paul B. Janeczko, illustrated by Richard Jones. Benji says he loves the rhythm of the poem, which shows him how to read it.

After that it was time for this year’s chair of the judges, Allie Esiri, to take to the stage to announce the 2021 shortlist. And it is (deep breath), alphabetically by poet:

Slam! You’re Gonna Wanna Hear This, chosen by Nikita Gill, Macmillan
This inspiring collection, curated with great skill by Nikita Gill, brings together ‘some of the fiercest voices in British verse’. It’s a book to excite young people about the potential of poetry, say the CLiPPA judges.

Bright Bursts of Colour, Matt Goodfellow, illustrated by Aleksei Bitskoff, Bloomsbury Education
The poems in Matt Goodfellow’s collection range from the silly to the sensitive, and all will resonate with children aged 7 – 11. The judges loved Matt’s dynamic representations of real-life experiences, and clear understanding of a child’s sensibilities.

Run, Rebel by Manjeet Mann, Penguin
Compelling, powerful, and authentic, Manjeet Mann’s verse novel speaks directly to its YA audience. The judges loved the fresh voice and how a form used by Coleridge is made new.

Big Green Crocodile Rhymes to Say and Play, by Jane Newberry, illustrated by Carolina Rabei, Otter-Barry Books
Beautifully presented and perfectly illustrated, this collection of new nursery rhymes is a perfect post-lockdown book, allowing grown-ups and small children to connect.

On the Move, Michael Rosen, illustrated by Quentin Blake, Walker Books
On the Move is both personal and universal, with messages of home, identity and family. Full of emotion, delivered with a perfect sense of understatement, words and illustrations provide readers with spaces to pause and consider.

Poets Jane Newberry, Manjeet Mann, Matt Goodfellow and Michael Rosen were there to read poems from their shortlisted collections, icing on the CLiPPA cake!

The winner will be announced on 11th October alongside the launch of the 2021 Shadowing Scheme. Do explore the books on the shortlist, because each of these collections reminds us what the best poetry for children can do, which is of course the point of all the CLiPPA celebrations. 

This year’s judges are poets Zaro Weil, 2020 CLiPPA winner with Cherry Moon; Amina Jama, whose debut poetry pamphlet A Warning to the House that Holds Me was published by Flipped Eye Press in 2019; Julie Blake, co-founder and Director of Poetry By Heart; and Charlotte Hacking, Learning Programmes Leader at CLPE.

Andrea Reece

Andrea Reece reviews for Lovereading4Kids, is managing editor of Books for Keeps and the children’s programme director for the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival. A former manager of National Poetry Day, she is very happy to be working now with CLPE on the CLiPPA. 

Book Magazine Editor

Andrea Reece: P is for … Reasons to be Cheerful

P is for … Reasons to be Cheerful

The last time I wrote a blog for the Poetry Summit it was January, eight months and a different world ago. Who would have thought way back then, that the ‘p’ word defining 2020 would not be poetry but pandemic?  My diary (I’m old-school and use a paper one, don’t @ me) is full of crossings-out: the whole of the Oxford Literary Festival including events I’d organised on the children’s and young people’s programme  with (gulp) Nikita Gill, Rakaya Fetuga, Jinhao Xie, Troy Cabida, and another with (gulp again) Allie Esiri, Samuel West, Diana Quick, Hugh Ross and Gina Bellman; a big scribble blots out 13 July, which should have been the date for the joyful and inspiring extravaganza that is the CLiPPA award ceremony at the National Theatre.

Looking back though, even if our year has been marked by a peculiar silence, for me as for many I’m sure, it has been punctuated by poetry. Moments I’ll remember include sitting in the garden listening to Roger Robinson’s new recordings for the Poetry Archive; the brilliant Forward Meet the Poet sessions featuring readings from the ten books shortlisted for the Forward Prizes and question and answer sessions with the shortlisted poets; Laura Mucha’s Dear Key Workers thank you poem to the NHS, created with the help of children cheered me hugely (and still does).

Now though, after all the cancellations and postponements, there are real reasons to be cheerful, amongst them the news that the CLiPPA Show will go on.  Thanks to a new partnership between CLPE and The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, the CLiPPA will be celebrated in the Festival’s programme for schools and families, and the winner announced in a very special Festival Poetry Show on Friday 9 October. The Poetry Show will be introduced live by CLiPPA judges, Valerie Bloom and Steven Camden, and will feature performances by the shortlisted poets.  Schools across the UK and beyond will be able to watch the show for free, and then, thoroughly inspired, join in a special post-event shadowing scheme and create their own poetry performances.  By the way, the shortlist will be announced on National Poetry Day, 1 October, another big date that’s certainly not going to be crossed out.

If that isn’t enough, just take a look at the autumn poetry publication schedules – there are some extraordinarily good collections coming out.  Many of my favourites are highlighted in the National Poetry Day recommended lists, including The Book of Not Entirely Useful Advice by A F Harrold and Mini Grey, SLAM!, the collection we were so excited to celebrate at the Oxford Literary Festival, and She Will Soar, a superb new collection edited by Ana Sampson, but The Girl Who Became a Tree (Otter-Barry Books) by Joseph Coelho, illustrated by Klaus Flugge Prize winner Kate Milner, is heart-stoppingly powerful, a mesmerising exploration of grief and renewal, while I haven’t stopped thinking about Punching the Air by Yusef Salaam and Ibi Zobo since I read it this summer.  HarperCollins will publish in the UK on 1 September, make sure you get a copy.

And one other thing that’s making me happy: in my last blog on here, I’d suggested that as part of the celebrations for the 40th anniversary of Books for Keeps, the UK’s leading children’s books review journal, we might create a new BfK Poetry Guide, and we’ve decided to do just that.  It will be published on National Poetry Day – when else? – and will be packed full of features, interviews with poets and of course reviews of the outstanding new poetry being published for children. You can get in touch to find out more or with feature suggestions (andrea@booksforkeeps.co.uk), and sign up for our newsletter to get it delivered to your inbox on National Poetry Day. (PS if you missed our July issue, there’s a great interview with Joshua Seigal by Liz Brownlee that I highly recommend).

Andrea Reece

Andrea Reece is Managing Editor of Books for Keeps.

National Poetry Day

Andrea Reece: Celebrating Poetry from the CLiPPA Until National Poetry Day, 3rd October

Celebrating Poetry from the CLiPPA Until National Poetry Day, 3rd October

National Poetry Day was honoured to attend the award ceremony for the fabulous CLiPPA (Centre for Literacy in Primary Poetry Award) at the National Theatre on 3rd July. And what an afternoon it was! An excited audience of poetry fans enjoyed superb live performances not only from the shortlisted poets – Steven Camden, Kwame Alexander, Rachel Rooney, Eloise Greenfield and Philip Gross – but from the pupils of five primary schools who had each shadowed the award. Groups of children, plus one solo performer took to the stage to give enthusiastic and accomplished performances of favourite poems from the shortlisted collections. By turns funny, touching, revealing, poignant and powerful, these poetry performances effortlessly filled the huge auditorium of the Lyttleton Theatre. Here again is proof of the creativity that poetry releases in children not to mention the confidence (the Lyttelton seats over 800) and of course the sheer joy.

We at National Poetry Day want every child in the country to experience that same rush of excitement that performing poems for others brings. Equally importantly, we want to encourage every young person to write their own poem ready to perform on National Poetry Day. That’s why we were delighted to announce the launch of #MyNPDPoem as the culmination of the CLiPPA ceremony.

Created in association with CLPE and with the support of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), #MyNPDPoem encourages schools everywhere to create poems, performances, displays and even special books.

This year’s National Poetry Day theme is Truth, and #MyNPDPoem invites students aged 6 to 13 to express the truths that matter to them, in poems. Topics might be the truth about your family, or your school; nature might provide inspiration, provoking a poem about the truths the natural world reveals; perhaps you’ll want to share a hidden truth about yourself and the way you feel about the world; or maybe you’ll want to explore the opposite of truth – lies!

National Poetry Day ambassadors Michael Rosen, Rachel Rooney, Joseph Coelho, Victoria Adukwei Bulley and Karl Nova have created special films filled with tips and poetry writing prompts all of which are available now on the NPD website nationalpoetryday.co.uk while a resource pack by CLPE gives teachers everything they need to get the most out of this new project.

Once children have written a poem or poems on the theme of truth, schools or teachers can share the best on National Poetry Day by tagging pictures on
Instagram or Twitter with #MyNPDPoem. We’d love it if schools choose to hold their own poetry show on National Poetry Day by inviting everyone to perform their poems aloud and there’s a special certificate for every young poet available for download from the National Poetry Day website. Schools who really want to celebrate their pupils’ writing can even publish the poems as a book for pupils to take home to show their friends and families, using Scholastic’s We Are Writers scheme.

This year is the 25th anniversary of National Poetry Day, and we’d like to make it the biggest ever. Every school who takes part in #MyNPDPoem will be part of those national poetry celebrations, celebrations that began at the CLiPPA, and that might just carry on for lifetimes.

Andrea Reece

Andrea Reece works for the Forward Arts Foundation as manager National Poetry Day. Andrea is the one in the middle in the top picture!

National Poetry Day Website.