Roald of honour

Never given a children’s literary award in his own lifetime, the wickedly funny Roald Dahl now has a book prize named after him, writes Jim Gilchrist

WRITING a good funny line can be a serious business, but earlier this year the often under-appreciated art of making young readers laugh was finally given recognition with the initiation of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, the shortlist for which was published this week.

The author’s contribution to children’s literature may be celebrated tomorrow on Roald Dahl Day, but despite creating such well-loved tales as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach, many of them since made into films, he never won a children’s literature prize during his lifetime.

“If there had been a prize for funny books when Dahl was writing, he would have won it with every book he wrote,” declared poet, broadcaster and current Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen, who launched the award. “That’s why this award was named in his honour.”

Rosen came up with the idea of the award because he believes that “all too often, when it comes to literary prizes, the humorous ones get sidelined, simply because they don’t tackle the big themes, and hooray for that, parents and children love reading funny books.”

Aiming to “promote laughter and humour as a feel-good factor when reading, by encouraging families to read together and discover the pleasure of humorous books”, the prize is intended to encourage children’s authors and illustrators who employ humour in their stories and poetry.

This is something that Rosen says can sometimes be remarkably hard work: “Anyone who tries it, whether doing picture books or novels or, as in my case, mostly poems, will know how really difficult it is. You’ve got to try and put yourself in the frame of mind of a child.”

Having come up with the idea of the prize he now finds himself chairing a judging panel which includes Sophie Dahl, the late author’s granddaughter, patron of the Roald Dahl Museum and an author herself, plus comedian and broadcaster Dara O’Briain, illustrator and political cartoonist Chris Riddell and children’s author Kaye Umansky.

Run by the Booktrust charity, which promotes reading, the prize has two categories – the funniest book for children aged six and under, and for children aged seven to 14, with the winner of each receiving 2,500 at an awards ceremony in London on 13 November. Rosen, who sees his job as Children’s Laureate as “an ambassador for fun with books”, has a long-established reputation with such children’s poetry collections as Wouldn’t You Like to Know, Quick Let’s Get Out of Here and Mustard, Custard, Grumble Belly.

At 62, Rosen has seen considerable changes in children’s humour and the publications catering for it: “When I was a kid the stories were mostly around private education – Billy Bunter and Jennings, that sort of thing. Today, the social dimension has changed; the humour is more popular – and populist.” And not to mention scatological: “You can make jokes about the bathroom and wee that would have been absolute taboo when I was a kid. That was part of the fun, of course, in the playground you only had to say the word and you’d fall over.”

But changing humour naturally influences those catering for it: “I think writers are now quite interested in pursuing a vein of humour, especially for older children, with various kinds of satire on TV and computer games, so you get mock Big Brother, or mock I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here, because they know it’s part of the children’s daily diet. It’s quite healthy, because it means that a lot of things that children might take seriously, they can find parodies of them in children’s books.”

As a child, Rosen was a great fan of AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories. “I read them over and over again and found more and more humour in them. It’s quite subtle. We discovered that a lot of the humour is in the fact that the characters don’t realise the obvious, but the child does, so the child feels more intelligent than the characters and that’s a good, healthy area of humour.”

Roald Dahl took children’s humour to a new level, the poet reckons. “He explored funny grotesque – the boy forced to eat the chocolate cake, the Twits, who are utterly grotesque, of course, and the great ruse that defeats the landowner in Danny the Champion of the World. It was almost Gothic humour. It was excessive, it was sometimes almost beyond belief.”

In Scotland, author Matthew Fitt, who has translated three of Dahl’s books into Scots, including The Twits, as The Eejits, agrees. “I think sometimes children’s authors try to be funny and fail miserably, but Dahl was genuinely a funny guy. I think that, like the best children’s writers, he held on to a bit of childhood mischief into his adult life.”

Fitt, with fellow author James Robertson, runs the Itchy Coo imprint in association with Black and White Publishing, producing books and teaching materials in Scots. Since the enthusiastic reception for The Eejits, he has translated two further Dahl books, under the titles Geordie’s Mingin’ Medicine and Sleekit Mr Tod. When he spoke to me, he was returning from a reading session at Glasgow’s Mitchell library as part of the countdown to Roald Dahl Day: “We find a lot of kids are now coming to Roald Dahl through our Scots translations, which is fantastic, because boys in particular don’t engage readily with reading and now we’ve found a way to engage them through the language.”

He and Robertson have just published another Scots translation, this time of the Winnie the Pooh stories (Winnie stays the Pooh, although Piglet, Owl and Eeyore become Wee Grumphie, Hoolet and Heehaw respectively). Is it spurious to speculate whether Scottish children laugh at different things from their counterparts south of the border? Fitt reckons that there are some differences: “Different children will always laugh at the same sort of things, but I do think Scottish children have a more playful sense of humour, particularly with language. They like all sorts of word games and puns and daft things like that, and I think they like authors who engage in that.”

• For further details on Booktrust and the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, log on to www.booktrust.org.uk For details of Roald Dahl Day, see www.roalddahlday.info

DAHL FUNNY PRIZE SHORTLIST

FUNNIEST BOOK FOR CHILDREN AGED SIX AND UNDER

STICK MAN by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Axel Scheffler (Alison Green Books)

ELEPHANT WELLYPHANT by Nick Sharratt (Alison Green Books)

THE GREAT PAPER CAPER by Oliver Jeffers (HarperCollins Children’s Books)

THE WITCH’S CHILDREN GO TO SCHOOL by Ursula Jones, illustrated by Russell Ayto (Orchard Books)

THERE’S AN OUCH IN MY POUCH! by Jeanne Willis, illustrated by Garry Parsons (Puffin Books)

MANFRED THE BADDIE by John Fardell (Quercus Books)

FUNNIEST BOOK FOR CHILDREN AGED SEVEN TO 14

MR GUM AND THE DANCING BEAR by Andy Stanton, illustrated by David Tazzyman (Egmont Press)

PADDINGTON HERE AND NOW by Michael Bond, illustrated by RW Alley (HarperCollins Children’s Books)

STOP IN THE NAME OF PANTS! by Louise Rennison (HarperCollins Children’s Books)

COSMIC by Frank Cottrell Boyce (Macmillan Children’s Books)

ALIENS DON’T EAT DOG FOOD by Dinah Capparucci (Scholastic Children’s Books)

URGUM AND THE GOO GOO BAH! by Kjartan Poskitt, illustrated by Philip Reeve (Scholastic Children’s Books)