Sarah McIntyre reports:

In London's BAFTA theatre, a team of librarian judges awarded the coveted CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for picture book illustrations and Carnegie Medal for novels to illustrator Freya Blackwood for Harry and Hopper' and writer Neil Gaiman for The Graveyard Book.

 In a short film about all the shortlisted Kate Greenaway illustrators, a judge summed up Blackwood's book in three words: poignant, emotional, powerful. Blackwood thanked Margaret Wild for her powerful text about a boy coming to terms with the death of his dog. She said she felt the award was particularly special because it was judged by children's librarians, who understand these books better than anyone. (You can read my Write Away interview with Freya Blackwood about Harry and Hopper here.)

Two schoolgirls named Jenny and Chloe joined the judges in awarding the Carnegie Medal to writer Neil Gaiman, presenting him with a braille edition of 'The Graveyard Book'. Gaiman thanked the illustrators for the two different editions of his book, Dave McKean and Chris Riddell both of whom were shortlisted for the Greenaway prize). Despite having won a huge gamut of recent prizes, Gaiman looked genuinely moved by the honour, saying it had been the most important to him because it was the first one he'd ever heard of: reading 'Carnegie Medal Winner' on the covers of the Narnia books. He credited key influences to The Graveyard Book – Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and Pamela Travers' Mary Poppins –and thanked his storytelling mentors Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones. Gaiman finished with this: 'Most of all, in this age of austerity into which we're currently tumbling, I wanted to say this: Libraries are our future. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever. Closing libraries can be seen as an easy way for a local authority to save a little money... and it is. But it is a terrible, terrible mistake, as we have recently begun to learn, to steal from the future to pay for today.'

Presenter and radio host James Naughtie thanked the three schools shadowing the judging process (sponsored by Peters Bookselling Services). He reminisced about one of his own favourite childhood books, Georgie the Ghost, and how he found the book in a shop in New York 50 years later and was moved to find that he could remember every picture. He praised libraries for putting books into the hands of readers, books which are meant to be 'looked at, smelt and felt, not just switched on'.