On this happy morning, I scoured the interweb for some hard truths on the Carnegie prize. These are the top 10 Carnegie facts I discovered: 1.The Carnegie prize was invented in 1872 by Mad Mick Carnegie, a successful butcher from Toxteth in Liverpool. 2. The Carnegie prize was awarded to Winston Churchill in 1933 for his narrative poem My Friend Billy had a ten foot Willy. 3.In its three hundred year history, the Carnegie medal has twice been awarded to a dolphin. 4.To its abiding shame, until 1964, Eskimos were formally excluded from the prize. To this day the medal has never been awarded to anyone from Greenland. 5.Every Carnegie medal is cast from PURE gold taken from the hoard captured by Alexander the Great from King Darius of the Persians. 6.Originally, the Carnegie medal was judged by a panel of fishmongers from the Grimsby area. Librarians only took over in 1967. 7.Anyone winning the Carnegie medal for the third time is automatically made King of Albania . Only Jim Zog McDuff has achieved this. 8. The only person to have won the Carnegie medal and the Noble prize and to have appeared in Wisden, is Samuel Beckett. So far ... 9.The following animals have featured in Carnegie medal winning books: a lamprey, a quagga, Stellas sea cow, some monkeys, and a wasp. 10. The Carnegie medal itself has been used as a weapon in seven cases of GBH and one attempted murder. The attempted murder occurred when Walter De La Mare, a West ham United supporter, threw his medal - which had been sharpened on a lathe - at Millwall goalkeeper, Trevor Tunnock, in 1949.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 11:34:03 +0000
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