Press release March 2010

The International School Libraries Network (ISLN) of Singapore is pleased to announce the first winners of the Red Dot Book Awards, a children’s choice award for recently published literature.

Picture book winner: Do Not Open This Book -- by Michaela Muntean

Junior book winner: The Diary of Amos Lee -- by Adeline Foo

Middle book winner: The Mysterious Benedict Society -- by Trenton Lee Stewart

Senior book winner: The Hunger Games -- by Suzanne Collins

The winning authors will receive a certificate and the right to display the Red Dot Award sticker on their book.

Eight books for each of the four categories were selected for the award shortlists by the Red Dot Award subcommittee of ISLN, after soliciting recommendations from other librarians. The books, all published in the past four years (2005-2009), were chosen to represent a range a countries, e.g., originally published in the UK, the US, Australia, France, Ireland, Australia, Italy, Canada, and Singapore. (Australian Standing Orders (ASO) generously donated copies of two of the Australian titles, which were hard to source in Singapore.)

Shortlisted books with a Singapore or Southeast Asian connection included:

• • Adeline Foo's The Diary of Amos Lee (the Junior category winner!)

  • Emily Lim's Just Teddy (in the Picture Book category)

  • Ben Morley's The Silence Seeker (in the Picture Book category; note: Ben, originally from the UK, is currently the assistant director at EtonHouse Pre-School on Orchard and this is his first book)

  • Shamini Flint's Ten (in the Middle category; autobiographical novel re growing up in Malaysia)

  • Tash Aw's Map of the Invisible World (in the Senior category; set in Indonesia)

  • Somaly Mam's The Road of Lost Innocence (in the Senior category; a Cambodian memoir)

(Note: Posters promoting the four Singapore-based authors can be downloaded and printed on either A3 or A4 size paper here: http://sites.google.com/site/reddots2009/authorposters )

The shortlist reading started in November and the voting was held for one week in the middle of March, with the winners announced on Friday, March 19th.

Eighteen international schools here in Singapore participated in the voting, with over 7,000 votes being cast. As this is a children’s choice award, only students voted. To cast one vote students must have read at least three books in a category. If they read six books in a category, they could vote twice. Votes were collected by each school either online or manually and then submitted to ISLN.

A Readers Cup competition, based on a subset of the Red Dot shortlists, will be held on Monday, May 10, 2010. Teams of students, one per international school per category, will participate in the event and Adeline Foo has been invited to attend as one of the judges.

The idea for the Red Dot awards came from Barbara Philip, a teacher-librarian at Tanglin Trust School and the ISLN president, and Katie Day, a teacher-librarian at UWCSEA East and the ISLN secretary.

They were inspired by two similar children's choice awards run by other international school librarian networks in Asia: the Panda Awards in Beijing and the Sakura Medal in Japan. See http://www.reddotawards.com/other-childrens-choice-awards).

The Red Dot Readers Cup competition is being modeled partly on the annual Queensland Readers Cup, held for school children in Australia, as well as the Battle of the Books, an annual competition run by the Hong Kong international school librarian network.

ISLN, the Singapore international school library network, is also responsible for the biennial Hands on Literacy one-day professional development conference for teachers and librarians. The next conference will be Saturday, November 13, 2010, at Tanglin Trust School and Dr. Ross Todd from Rutgers University in the US is the keynote speaker. See http://www.handsonlit.com for more information.

ISLN incorporated as a non-profit organization in 2009 with the following aims:

· To provide networking opportunities for school library staff and other interested parties;

· To promote the continuing professional development of teacher librarians and school library staff;

· To share, develop and publish materials which will promote the development of school libraries and teacher librarianship;

· To cooperate and liaise with other associations and bodies with similar aims and fields of interest.

See the ISLN website for more information: http://silcsing.wikispaces.com