Margaret Mahy - Awards

Awards

In 2006, Margaret Mahy won the biennial international Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing, in recognition of her lifetime contribution to children's literature. In a press release announcing the award, the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) said:

In awarding the 2006 Hans Christian Andersen Medal for Writing to Margaret Mahy, the jury has recognized one of the world’s most original re-inventers of language. Mahy’s language is rich in poetic imagery, magic, and supernatural elements. Her oeuvre provides a vast, numinous, but intensely personal metaphorical arena for the expression and experience of childhood and adolescence. Equally important, however, are her rhymes and poems for children. Mahy’s works are known to children and young adults all over the world. —Jeffrey Garrett, IBBY Announces the Winners of the Hans Christian Andersen Awards 2006.

Mahy won the Carnegie Medal in 1982, for her book The Haunting. In 1984 she won the medal again for The Changeover.

The Margaret Mahy Award, named for Mahy, is presented annually to "a person who has made a significant contribution to the broad field of children’s literature and literacy". Mahy was the first recipient of the award in 1991. Lectures by the winners are published, the standard of which was set by Mahy's inaugural lecture, Surprising Moments.

Other awards of Mahy's include:

• Best young adult novel, New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards, 2003, Alchemy
• Phoenix Award, 2005, The Catalogue of the Universe (1985)
• Phoenix Honor Book 2006 for The Tricksters
• Sir Julius Vogel Award 2006 for services to New Zealand science fiction and fantasy
• Phoenix Award 2007 for Memory
• New Zealand Post Children's book of the Year, 2011, for The Moon and Farmer McPhee