The Washington Post is reporting that Windsor, Ontario, resident Christopher Paul Curtis has scooped up his third Coretta Scott King Award for Elijah of Buxton, his YA novel about a free-born child in an Ontario farming community of escaped slaves (for Q&Q‘s review see here). The book also received a Newbery Honor at the American Library Association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia.

Laura Amy Schlitz took home this year’s Newbery Medal for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, a collection of dramatic monologues about a medieval village. The Caldecott Medal, which usually goes to a conventional picture book, was awarded to Brian Selznick for his genre-bending tome The Invention of Hugo Cabret, aimed at eight- to 12-year-olds.

Reportedly, Selznick was caught off guard by the win.

Selznick won the Caldecott Medal for The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a 500-plus-page category-buster that the author has called “not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things.” The judges decided that Selznick’s tale of an orphan who lives in a Paris train station was driven primarily by its elegant black-and-white drawings, which qualified it for the picture-book award.

Selznick said yesterday that the questions about his book’s genre were “part of what makes this [award] such a surprise.” His young protagonist ends up getting involved with one of the pioneers of the cinema, and Selznick said he chose a picture-heavy form “because I saw that it connected with how a director tells a story through a camera.”