Anne Fine (born 7 December 1947) is an English writer. She is best known for writing children's books, although she also writes for adults. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and she was appointed an OBE in 2003.
Fine has written more than seventy children's books, including two winners of the annual Carnegie Medal and three highly commended runners-up. For some of those five books she also won the Guardian Prize, one Smarties Prize, two Whitbread Awards, and she was twice the Children's Author of the Year. Her book Madame Doubtfire (1987) was adapted into Mrs. Doubtfire, the second-best grossing American feature film of 1993.
She has four sisters; her father was an electrical engineer and she grew up in Fareham, Hampshire. The eldest of the sisters is Elizabeth Arnold who also writes books for children; the three younger sisters were triplets. She studied History and Politics at university. At age 24, she wrote her first book.
Career
Describing the start of her writing career, Fine has written: "In 1971 my first daughter was born. Unable to get to the library in a snowstorm to change my library books, in desperation I sat down and started to write a novel. Clearly this was the right job for me, for I have never stopped writing for more than a few weeks since". In September 2010, Fine told The Daily Telegraph's Jessica Salter that this first book lay under her bed after being rejected by two publishers, adding "Five years later I unearthed it and entered it in a competition where I was runner-up, and it was finally published in 1978".
In March 2014, Fine lent her support to the campaign Let Books Be Books, which aims to persuade publishers of children's books to stop labelling and promoting books as "for boys" or "for girls". She told UK newspaper The Guardian: "You'd think this battle would have been won decades ago. But even some seemingly bright and observant adults are buying into it again […] There are girls of all sorts, with all interests, and boys of all sorts with all interests. Just meeting a few children should make that obvious enough. But no, these idiotic notions are spouted so often they become a self-fulfilling societal straitjacket from which all our children suffer".
She won the 1989 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising Goggle-Eyes as that year's best children's book, and she was one of two highly commended runners-up for the same Medal with Bill's New Frock. She also won the once-in-a-lifetime Guardian Prize for Goggle-Eyes and the Smarties Prize in ages category 6–8 years for Bill's New Frock.
Three years later, she won the Carnegie Medal again for Flour Babies (Hamilton, 1992), which was also named the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year.
The Tulip Touch (Hamilton, 1996) was her second Whitbread winner and her second highly commended for the Carnegie.
Up on Cloud Nine (Doubleday, 2002) was the last highly commended Carnegie runner-up, a distinction then used 29 times in 24 years. Fine is one of seven authors to win two Carnegie Medals (1936–2012) and the only author of three Highly Commended books.
123Today there are usually eight books on the Carnegie shortlist.
CCSU lists 32 "Highly Commended" runners-up for the Carnegie Medal from 1966 to 2002 but only three before 1979 when the distinction became approximately annual. There were 29 "HC" books in 24 years including two in 1989 and one each in 1996 and 2002. (The "Commended" distinction was used about 135 times from 1954 to 2002.)
• No one has won three Carnegies. Among the seven authors with two Medals, six were active during 1966–2002 and all wrote at least one highly commended runner-up, led by Anne Fine with three.
123Anne Fine's first two books, The Summer-House Loon and The Other Darker Ned, published by Methuen Children's Books in 1978 and 1979, were updated, linked by new text, and published by Corgi Children's Books in 2006 under the title On The Summerhouse Steps.
12"Candidates for the Hans Christian Andersen Awards 1956–2002"[link removed]. The Hans Christian Andersen Awards, 1956–2002. IBBY. Gyldendal. 2002. Pages 110–18. Hosted by Austrian Literature Online (literature.at). Retrieved 29 July 2013.
↑"Anne Fine". Children's Laureate (childrenslaureate.org.uk). Booktrust. Retrieved 28 September 2013.
↑Hollindale, Peter (1999) An Interview with Anne Fine. London: Mammoth
