The Tir na nOg Award winner for 2020 will be announced on Friday 3rd July. The award is given to the best children’s book with an authentic Welsh setting. Winners since the inaugural award in 1976 include The Snow Spider by Jenny Nimmo, The Grey King by Susan Cooper, Arthur The Seeing Stone by Kevin Crossley-Holland and The Clockwork Crow by Catherine Fisher.
We decided to look into the statistics behind the award to see if there is any indication of who is most likely to win…
It seems that if you want to win the Tir na nOg Award, your best bet is to be a female author named Jenny Lewis published by Pont/Gomer. The title of your book should be ‘The Tale of the Welsh King of the Sea’. And if you want the best shot at the trophy, then you’d need to go back to 1981 when there were 17 books shortlisted.
Gender. Female authors outnumber the men significantly, both in terms of receiving nominations and overall winners.
Individual Winners. Frances Thomas has won the title four times. First in 1981 then subsequently in 1986, 1992 and 2008. There are several authors who have won twice. Jackie Morris has won once as author and once as illustrator.
Nominations. Jenny Sullivan leads the nominations with 7 in total.
Publishers. One publisher has, far and away, published more shortlisted books than any other. Pont, an imprint of Gwasg Gomer, has published 54 of the titles. Gomer accounts for one third of all shortlisted titles.
Winners of the award have been published by…
We’ve analysed the names of all nominees to see which were the most popular:
Keywords. The most popular words in nominated titles…
The award has been withheld on 8 occasions, though not since 2003, so fingers crossed!
So what does this all mean for this year’s nominees? Er, probably not very much. However – we have to say that the shortlist is very strong and any of these would be worthy winners. We look forward to celebrating the 2020 winner very soon…