Join Jill Paton Walsh as she navigates a course for adults and children through the complications of choosing the right book for an enjoyable read

Children's author, the late Jill Paton Walsh, guides us through the complicated process of bringing children to the books that have been specifically written for them. In this programme, she explains how that process has to involve a ‘pig-in-the-middle' – in other words the adults and institutions who choose, buy, sell or supervise those books that are considered, according to their view, suitable for children. In that way a child's choice of book is already mediated by a host of other adults, including the author. Even books bought for children as gifts fail to engage the child since the choices are often based on the donor's own childhood favourites – like Enid Blyton – saying that children prefer contemporary books rather than the old classics. Jill Paton Walsh, who at the time of recording was a Creative Writing Fellow at Brighton Polytechnic, goes on to suggest that the adult should be as engaged in the book as the child since their enthusiasm for the story passes to the child. She then reads an extract from a story about an elderly woman, a dog and a cat, which is on the surface a simple story that a child can understand though the sub-text is much more complicated. Paton Walsh says this is not a problem as the child, as it grows and develops, might remember that story and be better able to understand its emotional dimensions. The programme concludes with Paton Walsh recommending a variety of books from contemporary authors that offer a wide and varied selection of stories across different genres for children to enjoy as they develop their reading abilities and habits.

Jill Paton Walsh (1937-2020), Baroness Hemingford CBE FRSL, was a Booker Prize nominated author best known for her children's books and for continuing the Lord Peter Wimsey - Harriet Vane stories of Dorothy L Sayers. Her historical novel 'Knowledge of Angels' was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994 and she received a CBE for services to literature in 1996 as well as winning the Phoenix Award for children's literature two years later.