“Mother, there is a big, yellow lion in the meadow.” The mother dismisses this claim. “The little boy said, “Mother, there is a lion in the meadow”, the mother dismisses this claim. You could use this in many ways in the classroom and this is yet another text I have read in which the lion is seen as saviour and as a danger. Jenny Williams' illustrations are beautiful but a little reading has shown me that there were earlier illustrations which look far richer in their imagining. It is certainly a book for rich discussion on many levels. Much like Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are, there is much going on beneath the surface around imagination as a vessel for needs (understood or not so) as well as the complexities around parenting and giving time to all your children. This just makes matters worse! Now we have a great, roaming dragon terrorising the land! Its description and fierceness grows the more the little boy's mother ignores his concerns, until exhausted, she comes up with a solution to combat his fears: she gives him a dragon to frighten the lion. A little boy is worried that he has seen a lion lurking in the meadow outside the house. Deceptively simple at first glance but a more complex theme underlies the story.
On 29 April 2013, New Zealand’s top honour for children’s books was renamed the New Zealand Post Margaret Mahy Book of the Year award. In 2006 she was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award (known as the Little Nobel Prize) in recognition of a "lasting contribution to children's literature". The Margaret Mahy Medal Award was established by the New Zealand Children's Book Foundation in 1991 to provide recognition of excellence in children's literature, publishing and literacy in New Zealand. In addition, some stories have been translated into Russian, Chinese and Icelandic.įor her contributions to children's literature she was made a member of the Order of New Zealand. Her novels have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Catalan and Afrikaans.
Among her children's books, A Lion in the Meadow and The Seven Chinese Brothers and The Man Whose Mother was a Pirate are considered national classics.
There have 100 children's books, 40 novels, and 20 collections of her stories published. Her books The Haunting and The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance both received the Carnegie Medal of the British Library Association. While the plots of many of her books have strong supernatural elements, her writing concentrates on the themes of human relationships and growing up. Margaret Mahy was a well-known New Zealand author of children's and young adult books.
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