''City of Gold and other stories from the Old Testament'' is a collection of 33

Old Testament The Old Testament (often abbreviated OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew writings by the Israelites. The ...

Bible stories retold for children by Peter Dickinson, illustrated by Michael Foreman, and published by Victor Gollancz Ltd in 1980. The British

Library Association The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, since 2017 branded CILIP: The library and information association (pronounced ), is a professional body for librarians, information specialists and knowledge management, knowle ...

awarded Dickinson his second Carnegie Medal recognising the year's outstanding children's book by a

British subject The term "British subject" has several different meanings depending on the time period. Before 1949, it referred to almost all subjects of the British Empire (including the United Kingdom, Dominions, and colonies, but excluding protectorates ...

and highly commended Foreman for the companion

Kate Greenaway Medal The Kate Greenaway Medal is a British literary award that annually recognises "distinguished illustration in a book for children". It is conferred upon the illustrator by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) ...

. ''City of Gold'' is a "radical" retelling of Bible stories, according to the retrospective online Carnegie Medal citation. "It is set in a time before the Bible was written down, when its stories were handed from generation to generation by the spoken word." U.S. editions by

Pantheon Books Pantheon Books is an American book publishing imprint with editorial independence. It is part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.Random House, Inc. Datamonitor Company Profiles Authority: Retrieved 6/20/2007, from EBSCO Host Business Source ...

(New York, 1980) and Otter Books (Boston, 1992) retained Foreman's illustrations.

Origin

Dickinson described the origin and development of particular story books to the Children's Literature Association when he received the retrospective

Phoenix Award The Phoenix Award annually recognizes one English-language children's book published twenty years earlier that did not then win a major literary award. It is named for the mythical bird phoenix that is reborn from its own ashes, signifying the bo ...

for ''

Eva Eva or EVA may refer to: * Eva (name), a feminine given name Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional characters * Eva (Dynamite Entertainment), a comic book character by Dynamite Entertainment * Eva (''Devil May Cry''), Dante's mother in t ...

'' in 2008. With ''City of Gold'', for instance, he was "asked to re-tell the stories of the Old Testament, which I did in the different voices of different people telling the stories for specific purposes while they still existed only in the oral tradition." The request and its deliberate fulfillment place the book near the "commissioned" end of the spectrum. Some others "begin with only what you might call the idea of an idea, a hunch, that there might be a book in them thar hills". His editor Joanna Goldsworthy at Gollancz made the request, he recalls, for a series of retellings illustrated by Foreman in which fairy tales by

Hans Christian Andersen Hans Christian Andersen ( , ; 2 April 1805 – 4 August 1875) was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, he is best remembered for his literary fairy tales. Andersen's fairy tales, consisti ...

and folk tales collected by the

Brothers Grimm The Brothers Grimm ( or ), Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859), were a brother duo of German academics, philologists, cultural researchers, lexicographers, and authors who together collected and published folklore. They are among the ...

had already been done. He declined and argued against the project, because there is no voice today for such retelling and because of the sharp contrast between stories "for amusement with glossy illustrations" and stories still "part of many people's deeply held convictions". But he found the multiple "imagined voices of people who had passionately believed in them." He acknowledges Rudyard Kipling for the technique.

Reception

Some librarians criticised the Carnegie award to Dickinson, wondering in the pages of the contemporary ''Literary Association Record'' why the panel of

judges so often chose books that no "ordinary" child would read. Panelist Vivian Griffiths responded that popularity with children was not a criterion; the point was

literary merit Artistic merit is the artistic quality or value of any given work of art, music, film, literature, sculpture or painting. Obscenity and literary merit The 1921 US trial of James Joyce's novel ''Ulysses'' concerned the publication of the ''Nausi ...

.Keith Barker, ''In the Realms of Gold: the story of the Carnegie Medal'', Julie MacRae Books, 1986.

Notes

References

External links

* {{s-end 1980 short story collections Children's short story collections Carnegie Medal in Literature winning works Books based on the Bible Novels by Peter Dickinson Victor Gollancz Ltd books 1980 children's books

Origin

Reception

See also

Notes

References

External links