The Blue Book of Nebo is a bleak novel, but not without its glimmers of optimism. A thought-provoking exploration of isolation, familial relations and Welsh language and culture, for a book light on plot, it’s emotional weight is considerable.

That sounded lovely, and I knew it was a lie. Everyone wants something. “Anything in the world, Mam. Even from the olden days.” Readers should be aware that there are discussions and descriptions of death, including the death of a child, as well as some implied sexual content. Yeah, but I think something needs to be written about The End. It doesn’t make sense otherwise. And I don’t know enough about it.’” The chair of judges, librarian Janet Noble, said of Ros’s novel: “The world-building and distinct voices of the two main characters, the son and his mother, are expertly realised and the reader is compelled to question their own relationship with the modern world”.Each year thousands of reading groups in schools and libraries in the UK and overseas get involved in the Awards, with children and young people ‘shadowing’ the judging process. They read, discuss and review the books on the shortlists, get involved in reading related activities in groups, and vote for their favourite books to win The Yoto Carnegie Shadowers’ Choice Medals for Writing and Illustration. For the first time in the awards almost 90-year history, the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing is awarded to a book in translation – The Blue Book of Nebo (Firefly Press), written and translated by Manon Steffan Ros. Told through the dual narrative of a mother and son in post-apocalyptic Nebo, this “compelling, conceivable” story explores Welsh identity and culture, and offers a beautiful appreciation of language. The original Welsh publication, Llyfr Glas Nebo, won multiple awards, including the 2019 Wales Book of the Year. In 2022, Katya Balen won both the Yoto Carnegie Medal and the Carnegie Shadowers’ Choice for October, October. The Yoto Kate Greenaway Medal – now named the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration – was won by Danica Novgorodoff for Long Way Down and Mariachiara Di Giorgio was awarded the Greenaway Shadowers’ Choice for The Midnight Fair. She got this book from a house we broke into in Nebo. It was in one of the small drawers of a little desk in the corner of someone’s living room. Usually, we only steal the really important stuff like matches or rat poison or books. But she held this notebook in her hands and turned it over a few times before putting it in her bag. The Yoto Carnegies celebrate outstanding achievement in children’s writing and illustration and are unique in being judged by an expert panel of children’s and youth librarians, including 12 librarians from CILIP, the library and information association’s Youth Libraries Group.

I don’t remember Mam’s birthdays before. Well, I remember the most recent ones, of course, but not the ones before The End. But I remember my own birthdays. The cakes and the candles and the shiny wrapping paper on the presents. And I remember the other children’s names, though I can’t remember their voices or the way they moved or laughed. The girl under the mast,” he smiled, as though he didn’t know that the pretty lights on Nebo mast had stopped working years ago.Yoto is an interactive audio platform for kids. Yoto offer acatalogue of stories, songs, activities and more to inspire creativeplay andlearning without a screen. The carefully connected audio players, Yoto Player(3rd generation)and Yoto Mini, put kids safely in control. Nocameras. No microphones. No ads. Centre for Literacy in Primary Education and the English and Media Centre have created expert teaching resources for the shortlisted books. The post-apocalyptic story that captured the heart of Wales gets to the heart of the mother-son relationship, the making of myth, and the humanity within us all. MSR: It was all new to me when I translated Blasu, and I struggled a little then. It’s so strange; even if you translate something word for word it’s never the same. The thing that emerges—it might be as good, better than the original even, but it’s never the same thing. Blasu in Welsh is a very dark novel, difficult to read, but in English it felt much lighter, and I couldn’t work out why. I was more confident when I came to Llyfr Glas Nebo. Having been invited by the Wales Literature Exchange to translate the opening chapter initially, I just kept going because I was enjoying it so much! I knew early on that I’d have to introduce new themes to it; for the same premise to work—Rowenna and Dylan, mother and son, writing their respective stories in a found notebook—I had to find a way to justify why they would be doing so in English rather than Welsh. The characters did change for me precisely because they were writing their stories in English. CD: Was it the same when you translated your earlier work Blasu into English? That appeared in English as The Seasoning in 2015.