The Siobhan Dowd Trust
Bringing books and reading to disadvantaged young people in the UK

Siobhan’s novel – Bog Child – has been awarded this year’s prestigious CILIP Carnegie Medal.

If a child can read, they can think;
and if a child can think they are free.

The Siobhan Dowd Trust was set up in 2007 to support disadvantaged young readers.  The Trust exists to fund any persons or organisations that:

• take stories to our children and young people without stories;
• bring the joy of reading and books to children and young people deprived of access to books and of the opportunity to read;
• fund and support disadvantaged young readers where there is no funding or support.

The Trust is the legacy of one of the UK’s most talented children’s writers, Siobhan Dowd, who died in 2007 at the age of 47.   Siobhan founded the Trust shortly before her death, bequeathing the royalties from her four books in support of its aims.

These aims reflect Siobhan’s belief in the freedom of the individual and the vital role books and reading play in enabling that freedom.  Between 1984 & 2004 Siobhan campaigned on behalf of imprisoned writers for International PEN, the writers’ rights organisation. In 1990 she moved to America where she  became programme director of American PEN’s Freedom to Write Committee in New York. She travelled extensively to investigate local human rights conditions for writers and became a well-informed and articulate critic of repressive regimes.  On her return to the UK in 1997 Siobhan helped set up English PEN’s Readers & Writers Programme, taking authors into schools in socially deprived areas, prisons, young offenders’ institutes and community projects.  In 2004 she became Deputy Commissioner for children’s rights in Oxfordshire and then began to write.

Between 2004 and 2007, Siobhan wrote four outstanding novels for young people, all of which have won awards. For her last novel Bog Child (2009), she became the first author to be posthumously awarded the UK’s premier accolade for children’s writing -  the CILIP Carnegie Medal.

In the very last days before she died, Siobhan set up the Trust. It was the final act of someone who had spent so much of her life working on behalf of others.

The Trustees  – Tony Bradman, Rachel Billington, Polly Nolan, Barry Kernon, Denise Dowd, Hilary Delamere, Sara Whyatt and David Fickling  (who was Siobhan Dowd’s editor and remains her publisher) – support the fundamental, important and urgent work of the Trust:  to ensure that disadvantaged children and young people have access to books, experience the joy of reading and develop their literacy to safeguard their future.

In support of Siobhan’s generous bequest, the Trustees invite donations from any organisations and members of the public who sympathise with and share the Trust’s aims.  Please see www.siobhandowdtrust.com or email the Trust.

Siobhan gave the Trust wide discretion, and for its first bequest the Trustees have decided to help Looked After Children, a group very close to her heart. The Siobhan Dowd Trust will be announcing its first bequest in autumn 2009.

The Siobhan Dowd Trust Books
A Swift Pure Cry (2006)
The London Eye Mystery (2007)
Bog Child (2008)
Solace of the Road (2009)

Awards
Winner of the Carnegie Medal, and the Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year for Bog Child.
Winner of the Sheffield Children’s Book Award, the Cheshire Schools’ Book Award, the Southwark Book Award, the Coventry Inspiration Book Award, and the Essex Book Award for The London Eye Mystery.
Siobhan’s wonderful books have also been shortlisted for fourteen other national and regional prizes.

The Trustees
Rachel Billington
Tony Bradman
Hilary Delamere
Denise Dowd
David Fickling
Barry Kernon
Polly Nolan
Sara Whyatt

Access further information and details for donations and applications.

Or contact us by email

Media Contact: David Fickling, David Fickling Books, 31 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2NP.
Phone: 01865 339000.