Josh Hutcherson (The Kids are All Right) and Liam Hemsworth (The Last Song) have joined the cast of Hunger Games in the roles of Peeta Mellark and Gale Hawthorne, respectively, Lionsgate announced today in a release. Both actors will star opposite Jennifer Lawrence, who will play Katniss Everdeen, the heroine who volunteers to represent her remote district in the brutal annual survival test.

Katniss' name comes from the plant which is more commonly known as Sagittaria, which is a tuber plant usually found in water.[3] The root of this plant can be eaten, as Katniss does in the book. Her father had a saying about this plant: "As long as you can find yourself, you'll never starve." This name also means "belonging to an arrow" in Latin, which might be attached to her skill with a bow and arrow.

Awards and recognition

The Amber Spyglass won the 2001 Whitbread Book of the Year award,[14] a prestigious British literary award. This is the first time that such an award has been bestowed on a book from their "children's literature" category.

The first volume, Northern Lights, won the Carnegie Medal for children's fiction in the UK in 1995.[15] In 2007 the judges of the CILIP Carnegie Medal for children's literature selected it as one of the ten most important children's novels of the previous 70 years. In June 2007 it was voted, in an online poll, as the best Carnegie Medal winner in the seventy-year history of the award, the Carnegie of Carnegies.[16][17]

The Observer cites Northern Lights as one of the 100 best novels.[18]

On 19 May 2005, Pullman attended the British Library in London to receive formal congratulations for his work from culture secretary Tessa Jowell "on behalf of the government".

On 25 May 2005 Pullman received the Swedish government's Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for children's and youth literature (sharing it with Japanese illustrator Ryōji Arai).[19] Swedes regard this prize as second only to the Nobel Prize in Literature; it has a value of 5 million Swedish Kronor or approximately £385,000.

The trilogy came third in the 2003 BBC's Big Read, a national poll of viewers' favourite books, after The Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice. At the time, only His Dark Materials and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire amongst the top five works lacked a screen-adaptation (the film version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which came fifth, went into release in 2005).