Danish queen, several countries withdraw from HC Andersen award because of a Russian representative as a member of jury.
In September, six months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Russian illustrator and art professor Anastasia Arkhipova was elected at the IBBY congress in Malaysia as president of the jury that will choose future winners of the HC Andersen Prize. (We wrote about Arkhipova before).
The prize has otherwise been called the “Nobel Prize” of children’s literature and has previously been awarded to prominent names such as Sweden’s Astrid Lindgreen and Denmark’s Cecil Bødker.
Representative of Russian cultural life cannot present the world’s most prestigious award for children’s books while Russia is bombing libraries in Ukraine – says Sweden, Finland, Norway, Belgium, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, among others.
The Danish IBBY board have chosen to withdraw its nomination of an illustrator and an author because of this situation. Danish Queen Margrethe has chosen to withdraw as patron of the award, which has also been removed from the list of the Queen’s foreign patronages on the Royal Palace’s website.
Please, sign the petition here to remove Arkhipova from a Jury of the HC Andersen award.
