Meg, Mog and the story of the Booker Prize trophy
Best known as the creator of the children’s classic Meg and Mog, the artist Jan Pieńkowski also designed the original Booker Prize trophy, which returns this year in his honour
By Sarah Shaffi
She stands tall and elegant, wearing a pleated sleeveless gown. Her head is turned to the right, her hair set in a tight bob. Her arms stretch above her, holding a large bowl. She doesn’t have a name, but you might still recognise her as the original Booker Prize trophy.
Unveiled at the first prize ceremony in 1969, the statuette was awarded to P.H. Newby for his 17th novel, Something to Answer For. As tall as the FA Cup, its shape resembled an Olympic torch - especially in BBC footage from that first year, which featured flames flickering in the trophy's bowl.
It had been designed by the artist Jan Pieńkowski, who was then at the start of a career that would see him go on to create and illustrate the award-winning Meg and Mog children’s books. Born in Warsaw in 1936, Pieńkowski was three years old when the Nazis invaded Poland. His father, who had organised resistance groups, was forced to live underground before fleeing across Europe with his family. After stints in Austria and Italy, they settled in England in 1946.
Pieńkowski spoke no English until he was 10 years old, yet quickly caught up. He read English and Classics at King’s College, Cambridge, before founding Gallery Five, a company that initially designed greetings cards. In his spare time, he illustrated children’s books for Jonathan Cape, whose publisher, Tom Maschler, was instrumental in founding the Booker Prize. In 1968, Maschler called Pieńkowski to say, ‘Jan, you’re a designer, could you design me a trophy for this new prize that’s being set up?’
Pieńkowski’s medium was paper and he admitted that he didn’t have the first idea how to go about trophies, but by chance he was wandering around Portobello Market in London and came across an old art deco lamp. It became the basis for his design.
Pieńkowski’s brief was, it seems, wide open. Photographs stored at the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at The University of Southern Mississippi, which holds a number of Pieńkowski’s papers, show what appear to be several rejected designs for the trophy, including an egg, a pegasus, a seated woman with a book on her lap and what appears to be a phallus.
In March 1969, the Booker Prize ordered eight trophies featuring the standing woman, at a cost of £52 10s each (roughly £750 today), with an extra £10 to be added later for an aluminium finish. A hundred cheap replicas were also ordered, to be displayed in bookshops. Each silver-coloured trophy stood 24 and a half inches tall, measuring eight inches in width at the bowl. They were arguably too big to be displayed on the winner’s mantelpiece, but the large bowl came in handy.
P.H. Newby’s daughter, Sarah, remembered both the real trophy and one of the replicas being on display in the family home; one in the bathroom and one in the hall, both with plants sitting on top of them. On the author’s website, she recalled: ‘Some time later, my mother spray-painted both trophies gold. She thought it would look better. My father wasn’t bothered.’ After the Newbys moved house, one of the trophies was placed near the front door ‘and used to put keys in’.
In 1973, a compact version of the trophy was created. Artist Patricia Turner scaled Pieńkowski’s trophy down to a more manageable 10 inches, and this smaller trophy was handed out to Booker Prize winners for several years, until authors began to be presented with a leather-bound copy of their book instead.
By that point, Pieńkowski was well into his successful career in children’s books. In 1971, he had won the first of his two Kate Greenaway Medals, for his and Joan Aiken’s book The Kingdom Under the Sea and Other Stories. The first of over 20 Meg and Mog books, illustrated by Pieńkowski and written by Helen Nicholl, had been published the previous year. In 2019, Pienkowski was awarded BookTrust’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He died on 19 February, 2022, aged 85, having earned a reputation as one of the all-time great children’s book illustrators.
Now, Pieńkowski’s Booker design has been revived in his honour. Newby’s original trophy was scanned and 3D-printed by Adam Lowe’s Madrid-based Factum Foundation, a not-for-profit which uses cutting-edge technology to create facsimiles of important and imperilled cultural artefacts around the world, including a recreation of Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt.
The new trophy is 30cm high, made of pewter and gilded - the golden colour is now part of Booker folklore, thanks to P.H. Newby’s wife. Now all she needs is a name.
To read more features, visit the Booker Prizes website