Manon Steffan Ros is celebrated as a playwright as well as a children’s author, and here she creates very powerful and rounded characters through their own words. Rowenna’s memories of the world before ‘The End’ show glimpses of her difficult earlier life, but we already know her as immensely strong and resourceful. The book is tightly focused on the family’s life with little speculation about the wider world, but the few relationships they have (with Dylan’s baby sister Mona and with a pet hare, for example) are beautifully and poignantly realised. Dylan, although he was a six-year-old used to tech-toys and mobile phones, almost immediately became fascinated with growing things, and he matures naturally into a farmer with little sense of loss. However, as he reaches puberty his feelings are confused, and a scene in a deserted house where he sees a teenage girl’s photos of her life and friends is most sensitively imagined. In 2022, Katya Balen won both the Yoto Carnegie Medal and the Carnegie Shadowers’ Choice for October, October. The Yoto Kate Greenaway Medal – now named the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration – was won by Danica Novgorodoff for Long Way Down and Mariachiara Di Giorgio was awarded the Greenaway Shadowers’ Choice for The Midnight Fair. MSR: The honest answer is that I don’t overthink it—it’s a matter of doing what feels right at the time. But it’s an interesting point that all of us who have been raised in Welsh, who live in and through Welsh, have bilingual influences. There is no point denying that; it enriches us. There’s a hell of a view from the lean-to. Down toward Caernarfon, where you can see the castle towers jutting out like gnarling teeth, and then the sea and Anglesey beyond it. I can’t ever remember going to Anglesey, but Mam says I went loads of times when I was a little boy. There were nice places to go for walks, Mam says, with nice beaches all around, because Anglesey is an island. I was thinking about that yesterday when I was sitting on the roof of the lean-to, looking out. Seeing the sea and the island, which looks too big to be an island from here. There are trees and fields and places I don’t know between here and the sea. Yesterday was a cold day—cold enough to make my mouth steam, like snow in a saucepan. I sat there thinking about all those people in the olden days, poor things, going to beaches in their cars and sitting there all day with nothing to do. Standing with their feet in the water, then splashing about a bit and then having a picnic. I try not to think about those people too much. Yoto is an interactive audio platform for kids. Yoto offer acatalogue of stories, songs, activities and more to inspire creativeplay andlearning without a screen. The carefully connected audio players, Yoto Player(3rd generation)and Yoto Mini, put kids safely in control. Nocameras. No microphones. No ads.

Inspired by Montessori principles, Ben Drury and Filip Denker founded Yoto in 2017. Yoto Player was designed with renowned design agency, Pentagram, and launched in early 2020. Yoto Mini, the portable audio player, launched in late 2021. The new and improved third generation Yoto Player arrived in summer 2023. CD: Was it the same when you translated your earlier work Blasu into English? That appeared in English as The Seasoning in 2015.In this prize-winning novel, Manon Steffan Ros not only explores the human capacity to find new strengths when faced with the need to survive, but also questions the structures and norms of the contemporary world. Thanks to the young readers far and wide who have engaged with our shortlists and voted for their own deserving Shadowers’ Choice Medal recipients. Huge congratulations to all four of our Yoto Carnegie medal winners for this year, who demonstrate the best of children’s writing and illustration in its myriad of forms.”

Improving news literacy is at the heart of First News, whether through our acclaimed news service or our award-winning news-based learning tools and resources for schools and educators.The Yoto Carnegies celebrate outstanding achievement in children’s writing and illustration respectively and are unique in being judged solely by librarians. I don’t know why I lied to him about my name when we first met. Maybe everything felt too personal in this new world, and my name felt like the only thing that belonged exclusively to me. Dylan called me Mam. No one said Rowenna anymore.