Speaking at Leeds, Peterborough and Newcastle
Anne Fine is a distinguished writer for both adults and children. Her novel Goggle-Eyes won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize as well as Britain’s most coveted award for children’s literature, the Carnegie Medal. She won the Carnegie Medal again for Flour Babies, which also won the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year Award. Among her many other prizes are the Smarties Prize for Bill’s New Frock, a second Whitbread Award for The Tulip Touch, silver Nestle prizes for Bill’s New Frock and Ivan the Terrible, and many other regional and foreign awards.
In 1990 and again in 1993 she was voted Publishing News’ Children’s Author of the Year. In 1998, she was the UK nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Adaptations of her work have been screened by the BBC and her novel Madame Doubtfire was adapted for film under the title Mrs Doubtfire. It is also currently showing as a musical in London.
Anne Fine became Children’s Laureate in 2001 and during her two years of office set up the Home Library (free downloadable modern bookplates, still available from www.bookplates.co.uk) , published three classic anthologies of poetry for different age groups, called A Shame to Miss 1, 2 & 3, and was instrumental in the setting up of ClearVision.org ‘s ever expanding library of braille and moon picture books shared between sighted parents and visually impaired children, and vice versa.
Anne Fine has also published eight highly acclaimed novels for adults, including In Cold Domain, Telling Liddy, All Bones and Lies and Raking the Ashes. Her work for both adults and children has been translated into forty five languages. In 2003 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded an OBE. Anne has two grown up daughters, and lives in County Durham.