A look at the 2025 Carnegie Award winners, through my thoughts and reviews and those of illustrator Tamsin Rosewell and a young Carnegie Shadower.
The Carnegie awards for writing 2025 have once again focussed largely on boyhood and young masculinity (see also my post The Carnegie Award 2024). This theme is reflected in the original shortlist of eight books selected by the Carnegie committee.
The Carnegie Medal for Writing – 2025 winner
Published by: Faber & Faber, 2024. Available from Amazon.
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Glasgow Boys by Margaret McDonald is in every sense a raw novel. It is the debut of the youngest author ever to win the award, at the age of 27. The mostly separate stories of the lives of two boys is told in alternating chapters. Finlay and Banjo were both brought up in care and are both deeply emotionally wounded by their past experiences, and struggling to understand the world they live in.
When their paths cross again after several years, the stories of their pain is right on the surface, often defending them against attempts by others to understand and help them, but there is much that is too deeply buried to be expressed.
This visceral novel is at times not an easy read, There is much weeping, much vomiting, much physical and emotional rage; there is also much love. To describe the plot would be to diminish the author’s skilled slow reveal of background information. Many questions are raised; who are Banjo and Finlay, how did they meet, what have they individually been through that has given them so much torment, and these questions are answered in a series of flashbacks throughout the novel.
I described the novel as raw. So too, is the style, where the very frequent use of street language expletives such as ‘fucking’ can be irritating and repetitive, and not always necessary. Many older readers regard ‘loose’ vocabulary reinforces its casual and repetitive usage as customary speech, devaluing the language of literature, and in general I agree.
What it does here is to strip away any pretentiousness. These are real boys speaking, and their anger is tangible. When the author as narrator uses the same vocabulary the reader is made to understand that this is an angry novel written straight from the heart.
Margaret McDonald has a deep understanding of the characters she has created and of the reason why both Finlay and Banjo find it so hard to accept friendship and love, except from each other. I recognise these boys and their situations. In my brief early career as a social worker, before my children were born, I worked with children in care; I experienced their anger and hopelessness, their inability to trust anyone.
That was nearly sixty years ago. Nothing has changed, but this young author has revealed most fluently a dark and dangerous childhood, and given readers of her book an understanding and perhaps a way forward. Maybe, as in the story, the offers of the friendship and love of outsiders will be extended and finally grasped.
Many congratulations to Margaret McDonald for witing such an unforgettable and powerful novel for young readers.
The Carnegie Medal for Illustration – 2025 winner
Published by: Walker Books, 2025. Available from Amazon.
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Clever Crow by Olivia Lomenech Gill and Chris Butterworth is a beautifully illustrated non-fiction book about the natural history of corvids – but presented as an active, lively storybook. The text is fun and engaging for a younger child, full of wonder and interest, while not falling into the trap of a syrupy, glorified approach to nature.
Many of the spreads are about these birds in an urban setting, which I was delighted to see; too much nature writing for children has a subtle implication that countryside = good and cities = bad, and it troubles me that perhaps this is an unhelpful and unkind message for the many children who will be reading those books in cities that they know and love being part of.
The illustration approach weaves in the detritus of human life: the discarded metal, paper and plastic, over-filled bins, the working landscape of farms and lost or thrown-away shiny objects used to decorate nests. I’d have liked the text of Clever Crow to have been a little longer – maybe to include more about the relationship between these birds and humans, and how they’ve worked their way into human stories and lore all over the world.
I feel that publishers today seriously underestimate the interest of a young child in non-fiction details, or they push the age of the text down to the lowest possible level. I loved what was there in the book and the way it was handled both by the author and the illustrator, but even for a young child it didn’t feel quite enough. However, Clever Crow has been blessed with, appropriately, hugely intelligent, thoughtful illustration which adds enormously to the content.
Olivia Lomenech Gill’s work has a wild energy to it. You feel it as well as see it on the page. In this age when so much is created on a screen, seeing her lavish textures of ink and watercolour, collage and pencil makes you realise how tightly we need to hold on to what is real and physical, and what we stand to lose if we allow the digital to dominate.
Her work is accomplished and painterly. Here we see properly messy nature which finds its way in cities, steals from dustbins and adapts to urban structures. I really enjoyed the spread of the city, which is somehow all world cities at once (and yet still familiar to a city dweller like me!); it is a jumble of temples, pyramids and domes, cafes and glass tower blocks, cranes, gardens and gas towers.
In this book the birds are often set against backgrounds in which the human world encroaches: scraps of abandoned printed paper are glimpsed through the grass, school workbooks are used as the setting for natural history illustrations, and newsprint used in collage reinforces the message of both the intelligence of these creatures and the importance of human landscapes for their success.
Some of my favourite pages are the endpapers. A full spread of patterned birds’ eggs is a lovely way to start this book – and then we spot the curiously blank egg of the Flores crow. If we just pause, we find on the title page a note which explains that even at a time when we can search millions of pictures in seconds, there is no collected image of the egg of this bird.
The surviving population of this Indonesian island corvid is now only around 1000. When we turn to the final pages of the book we see each bird, hatched, grown and poised in place of its egg, ready to fly off. A great choice and a much-deserved medal for an accomplished illustrator.
I am delighted to see a non-fiction book win a major award, particularly for its illustration, as both these things are under-celebrated in the book industry.
– Tamsin Rosewell
The Carnegie Shadowers Medal for Writing – 2025 winner
Published by: Hot Key Books, 2024. Available from Amazon.
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King of Nothing by Nathanael Lessore is incredibly well-written, and addresses serious topics without the plot becoming heavy or arduous, which is extremely hard to do. The humour throughout is a lovely addition to the story, and complements the narrative that this is from the perspective of an ordinary boy from London. The characters are relatable to the audience, have detailed personalities and clearly represent the issues they were intended to address. As I was reading, I found that I could relate the book to myself and people around me at school, which is a massively important thing for a book like this. My only criticism is the lack of character description, however I understand that this is most likely due to the writing style, so is the correct decision for the book. Overall, a great book.
– Imogen (Hope Valley College Carnegie Shadowers Group)
King of Nothing has also won Waterstones children’s book prize for older readers, the Jhalak prize for fiction for children and older readers, and is shortlisted for the Amazon Book of the Year award.
Nathanael Lessore, 35, is the author of several highly successful novels.
Interestingly, in their reviews of King of Nothing, a couple of the other Shadowers in the Hope Valley Group mentioned the ‘over-use of repetitive, made-up words that the readers found to be confusing and meaningless’.
The Hope Valley Shadowers’ overall choice for the Carnegie Medal
The Things We Leave Behind by critically acclaimed author Clare Furniss, which I and most of the students really enjoyed. A startling YA dystopia that imagines London as the epicentre of the refugee crisis.
The ‘One We Thought Would Win’ was The Final Year by Matt Goodfellow: ‘a powerful and moving story in poems of a primary school boy with many issues to cope with’.
You can see we were all surprised by the judges’ and Shadowers’ choices, which were very different from ours.
Which shows that you can’t please all of the people all of the time! It’s a tribute to the shortlist selectors that so many students enjoyed reading, discussing and making selections from the 2025 Carnegies.
– Harriet Mummery, librarian of Hope Valley College
My own Carnegie-winning books
Published by UCLan, 2024. Available from Amazon.
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Published by Penguin, 2016. Available from Amazon.
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