My first comic festival – not scary at all!

We know you’ll all be eager to see the video of last night’s Women in Digital Publishing event which will up very soon. But whilst you’re waiting, here’s something completely different!

As you know we are really keen on graphic fiction here at Hot Key and delighted that an illustrated book (A Monster Calls) won both the Greenaway and the Carnegie Medals this year – congratulations Patrick Ness and Jim Kay!

As I blogged about before, I’m pretty new to the comic/graphic novel world and was curious to go to a comic festival to find out more, but felt a bit shy about it. So I decided to dip my toe in the water, and headed over to East London for my very first comic festival, the inaugural East London Comic and Arts Festival held at Village Underground in Shoreditch organised by Nobrow. Check out the amazing mural on the outside wall.

Inside the place was buzzing. The exhibitors hall was full to bursting with visitors and publishers, both large and small, including Random House, Self Made Hero, Nobrow and many others, all selling their graphic novels and comics at a discount with their authors hanging around their stands to chat and sign copies of their books. Heaven!

The event space was set up for the ‘Happy Sports Village Drawing Marathon’ organised by the great people behind Anorak magazine – where kids could create an Olympic inspired comic by cutting out images and letters. My daughter had a great time colouring, cutting and sticking to create her Olympic scene.

Next up were some brilliantly inventive animation short films and adverts created by the team at Nexus. One of the most entertaining was one about two funeral directors who’s hearse is flattened by a boulder and their comic/tragic adventure to get the coffin and corpse to the burial ground.

After a spot of lunch I caught the end of the ‘Tac au Tac 2012’ Drawing Relay Race with Luke Pearson – here he is busy drawing a fearsome duck beast ridden by an alien creature.

The highlight of the day for me was a fascinating panel discussion about the current poplar trend in autobiographical graphic novels. The panel comprised Simone Lia (Fluffy, Please God, Find Me a Husband), Darryl Cunningham (Psychiatric Tales, Science Tales) and Karrie Fransman (The House that Groaned) chaired by Becky Barnicoat from the Guardian.

The panel discussed why it was such a popular genre and key thoughts were that for autobiographical stories to work they need to think of the reader and tell them something about themselves – not just navel gazing. They also spoke about the ethics of using family and friends as subjects in their stories.

Karrie Fransman uses her family and friends extensively for her comic strips but consciously chose a non-fiction story for her first graphic novel The House That Groaned. She is now working on a reportage story.

Simone Lia’s first graphic novel was a fictional story called Fluffy, about a rabbit who thinks he is human and finds out he’s not. Her latest book Please God, Find Me a Husband on the other hand is a deeply personal about her relationship with God, which took her four years to write because it was such a difficult story to tell. She said that her next book will definitely not be about herself and like Karrie, she is next planning a reportage-style story about her community.

Darryl Cunningham used his own person experiences with depression and anxiety as well as his experience as a Psychiatric nurse to talk about mental health in Psychiatric Tales. Although he has been questioned by a colleague about using his patients stories, he has only had positive feedback from everyone who read them.

Everyone agreed that the author does have a certain responsibility to respect their family and friends privacy and in Darryl’s case his patients, and wouldn’t write about anything they would be unhappy about.

After the talk I hit the exhibition hall and spent lots of money on books (very difficult to resist) and even got to have a chat with the brilliant Hannah Berry (currently Booktrust Writer in Residence check out her blog!) who signed my copy of Adamtine and drew a scary picture!

Then I got to meet the lovely Simone Lia who was interested in attending the Drawing the Graphic Novel course despite the fact that her book is on our reading list! She also signed my book for me and did another picture!

I then had to head off to the Museum of Childhood to join my family so missed out on the rest of the programme but next time I’ll be sure to stay all day! This was a really great event full of friendly, passionate people – not scary at all!

Carnegie Challenge – Under 24 hours to go…

…and, with only the slight cheat of putting two books in one post, WE’VE DONE IT!

So here we have

Small Change for Stuart by Lissa Evans

and

 Everybody Jam by Ali Lewis

You know how this works - let us know what you think of the books in the comments section.  We’ve been nattering on about these in the kitchenette area, so there’ll be lots fo HKB comments.

So who do you think will win?  Is it a different book to the one you think should win?

(I’m not saying anything just so I can nod sagely when the winner is announced and smirk in a knowing way.)

Hot Key Carnegie Challenge Book 4: My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher

Whilst we pour over our wonderful Young Writers Prize entries (So impressed! Keep ‘em coming…) we can consider what literary heights the winners might climb. The Carnegie Prize is one of the most well-renowned and respected of them all, which brings us back to our challenge!

Since our last challenge we have been enjoying My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher. A book that is described as ‘a stunning debut novel about the tragedy that tears apart a family after a terrorist attack’.

The blurb : Ten year old Jamie hasn’t cried since it happened. He knows he should have – Jasmine cried, Mum cried, Dad still cries. Roger didn’t, but then he is just a cat and didn’t know Rose that well really. 

Everyone kept saying it would get better with time, but that’s just one of those lies that grown-ups tell in awkward situations. Five years on, it’s worse than ever…’

A great video trailer really  caught my eye – here it is!

We’ve heard really wonderful things about this book – what about you?

Hot Key Carnegie Challenge Book 3: Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

Our reading challenge has been slightly delayed by London Book Fair but we remain dedicated to the cause! We WILL read the eight books before the winner is announced in June…

Over the last few weeks we’ve been reading Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys:

The blurb goes: Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they’ve known. Separated from her father, forced onto a crowded and dirty train car, Lina, her mother, and her young brother slowly make their way north, crossing the Arctic Circle, to a work camp in the coldest reaches of Siberia. Here they are forced, under Stalin’s orders, to dig for beets and fight for their lives under the cruelest of conditions.

Lina finds solace in her art, meticulously-and at great risk-documenting events by drawing, hoping these messages will make their way to her father’s prison camp to let him know they are still alive. It is a long and harrowing journey, spanning years and covering 6,500 miles, but it is through incredible strength, love, and hope that Lina ultimately survives. Between Shades of Gray is a novel that will steal your breath and capture your heart.

We’ve had lots of people tell us how much they loved this book on Twitter, so let’s continue the discussion below!

Hot Key Carnegie Challenge Book 2: Trash by Andy Mulligan

Last week’s book on our Hot Key Carnegie Reading Challenge, A Monster Calls sparked a great discussion – please add your comments here if you haven’t already! We have until 14th June (when the winner is announced) to read the list and poll on our winning book.

Next up is Trash by Andy Mulligan, published by David Ficking Books. Here’s the official blurb:

Raphael is a dumpsite boy. He spends his days wading through mountains of steaming trash, sifting it, sorting it, breathing it, sleeping next to it.

Then one unlucky-lucky day, Raphael’s world turns upside down. A small leather bag falls into his hands. It’s a bag of clues. It’s a bag of hope. It’s a bag that will change everything.

Soon Raphael and his friends Gardo and Rat are running for their lives. Wanted by the police, it takes all their quick-thinking and fast-talking to stay ahead. As the net tightens, they uncover a dead man’s mission to put right a terrible wrong.

And now it’s three street boys against the world…

We’ve been reading this week and over the bank holiday weekend – see what we thought and get involved below!

Reasons to Eat More Chocolate

Not that we need any.

It’s a 4 day weekend, and what are you going to do with it?  We’ve got our Carnegie challenge and a pile of submissions from Bologna to read through, so that’s us pretty much sorted.

If you’re not joining in the challenge (and why not?) then The Guardian have got some brilliant ideas for Easter reading here and here.  Alternatively, here are some of our favourite books for sharing with rabbits in them.  (Or even sharing with rabbits).

Rabbit’s Nap

The Rabbit Problem

The Great Rabbit Rescue

We’re not just about the chocolate you know.

Hot Key Carnegie Challenge – Book 1: A Monster Calls

Last week we made a pact that we would read and discuss the Carnegie Shortlist here at Hot Key and today is the start of our first discussion. We’d love you to join in too!

We decided to start with Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls – mainly as it had been at the top of many of Team Hot Key’s TBR pile for a while.

For those of you who haven’t read it yet, or don’t know what it’s about – here is the publisher’s (Walker) blurb:

The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do.

But it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting. He’s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming… The monster in his back garden, though, this monster is something different. Something ancient, something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth. Costa Award winner Patrick Ness spins a tale from the final idea of much-loved Carnegie Medal winner Siobhan Dowd, whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself.

Darkly mischievous and painfully funny, A Monster Calls is an extraordinarily moving novel of coming to terms with loss from two of our finest writers for young adults.

This is the place where we’ll discuss what we thought of it, and please do the same! When we get through the whole list, we’ll run a poll on which one we all think will win.

SO, what did you think? Let us know in the comments below:

Hot Key Carnegie Reading Challenge

A big day for many authors and illustrators today – the shortlists for the Carnegie Medal and Kate Greenaway Award were announced. Cue lots of congratulations all round and happy authors and publishers. There are some absolutely fantastic books on the shortlists this year.

At Hot Key obviously we don’t have any books out yet to qualify (fingers crossed for next year…) but it prompted a series of conversations around the Carnegie Shortlist that all went ‘ooh I love that book‘, ‘ah that one definitely deserves to win‘ and ‘aw, I really must read that!’ (N.B. we’re not snubbing the picture books – we love picture books, we just don’t publish picture books…so, we thought we’d focus on the fiction) Anyway, each year there is an official shadowing scheme which runs alongside the awards involving children from many schools around the country reading and discussing the books from longlist, shortlist and through to the winning announcement. And so we thought, well, why don’t we do the same?

Each week (if we can keep up!) we’ll be discussing a different book on the Carnegie shortlist and we’d love you to join in. Here are the books we have to read:

So far I’ve only read the already multi-award-winning A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (amazing book which as discussed on Twitter today, made me feel VERY SAD at the end) and my one that got away Annabel Pitcher’s My  Sister Lives on the Mantlepiece – which you all know my feelings about (and if you don’t then basically, LOVED IT). But that’s only 2 out of 8, so the challenge is on.

But what to start with? Suggestions and reviews please?