'Outstanding' Carnegie medal longlist includes three previous winners

Previous winners Elizabeth Acevedo, Patrick Ness and Ruta Sepetys up for prestigious children’s book award, with loss a common theme

An “outstanding” longlist for the UK’s most prestigious children’s books prize, the Carnegie medal, pits three former winners against each other – Elizabeth Acevedo, Patrick Ness and Ruta Sepetys.

This year’s 20-book longlist teems with novels exploring loss, grief and mental wellbeing. Acevedo’s novel in verse, Clap When You Land, follows two girls devastated by the death of their father. Manjeet Mann’s Run, Rebel, another verse novel, follows a girl trying to escape her claustrophobic home life. In, The Girl Who Became a Tree, by performance poet Joseph Coelho and illustrator Kate Milner, a girl tries to make sense of the loss of her father. In Jenny Downham’s Furious Thing, a 15-year-old girl deals with emotional abuse from her mother’s fiance. And in Danielle Jawando’s And The Stars Were Burning Brightly, a teenage boy’s world falls apart when his brother takes his own life.

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