And the Sid Fleischman Award was named after – he was the first speaker at the SCBWI. So many years ago.
And it took him a long time to win a Newbery Award. You know, he had a whole body of literature and that’s because we all felt that he wrote comedy. He wrote – he was just a master of comic invention, historical novel comedies and so one year he was sort of bemoan — then he did finally win the Newbery for The Whipping Boy but we were talking about – we were bemoaning the fact that so many great novelists, Paula Danziger, for instance, Judy Blume have never won the Newbery and the Caldecott because they’re viewed as more serious.
So we decided to create in his honor, in his name the Sid Fleischman Award which is for a work of excellence but in the humor vain, in the category of humor and we’re so proud of that. It’s been existing for 10 years and because the books, they’re not joke books, they’re not necessarily ha ha books but they’re books where comic invention is at the center of the plot line, the center of the characters.
And so I think that’s recognized a whole body of literature that is very easy for the Caldecott and Newbery committees to overlook and I think they do overlook them and those are the ones when you look at the Kid’s Choice Awards and the popularity awards, those are the ones, you know, those are the ones that come in first, so we feel really proud of being able to acknowledge that, you know, what is the old song that dying is easy but comedy is hard, you know?
That it’s just as difficult to write a humorous book as it is to write a tragic book or an issue book, so this allows a special category for those, a special place for them to be acknowledged in the pantheon of great books.
