The Booker Prize launches The Children’s Booker Prize

The charity behind two of the world’s most significant literary prizes has announced a new £50,000 award for children's fiction, supported by the AKO Foundation.

The Booker Prize Foundation will launch the Children's Booker Prize in 2026, to be awarded annually from 2027. The foundation awards the prestigious Booker Prize and International Booker Prize, and this is its first new award in 20 years.

The £50,000 Children's Booker Prize will celebrate the best contemporary fiction for children aged eight to 12 years, written in or translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

Helping to spread the word for children's reading

The aim of the prize is to engage and grow a new generation of readers by recognising and championing the best children's fiction from writers around the world, said its organisers. Children's Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce will be the inaugural Chair of judges for 2027 and children will help choose the winners alongside a panel of adult judges. As part of the process, at least 30,000 copies of the shortlisted and winning books will be gifted 'to ensure more children can own and read the world's best fiction'.

Cottrell-Boyce welcomed the new award: "Every child deserves the chance to experience the happiness that diving into a great book can bring," and the Children's Booker Prize will, he said, "make it easier for children to find the best that current fiction can offer. To find the book that speaks to them." Inviting children to the judging table and gifting copies of the nominated books will, he added, "bring thousands more children into the wonderful world of reading". 

Former Booker Prize and Carnegie Medal-winning author Penelope Lively will give the keynote speech at the Booker Prize 2025 ceremony in November to celebrate the new prize. A Children's Booker Prize teaser video has also been launched.

Children's involvement in the judging process

During the judging process, Frank Cottrell-Boyce and two other adult judges will select a shortlist of eight books. Three child judges will be recruited, through working with schools and other industry partners, to join the adults in choosing the winning book. The process will give children a direct voice in the outcome, ensuring the book is recommended by young readers to their peers.

The inaugural prize will open for submissions from publishers in spring 2026, when the remaining two adult judges will be made public. The shortlist of eight books - and the three child judges - will be announced in late November 2026, with the winner revealed at a high-profile event for young readers in February 2027. The eligibility period for the 2027 prize is 1 November 2025 to 31 October 2026.

As with the Booker Prize and International Booker Prize, the shortlisted authors will each receive £2,500 and the winning author £50,000, ensuring that children's prize recipients are given the same level of financial reward and recognition as their counterparts writing fiction for adults. The prize will be open to authors worldwide, both for books written originally in English and for those translated into English, as long as they are published in the UK and/or Ireland within the eligibility period. The prize will be shared equally with the winning book's illustrator or translator, where applicable.

The Children's Booker Prize aims to inspire young readers

The Booker Prizes has a long history, some 55 years, of awarding prizes and transforming the careers of writers, building a global community of readers and helping to shape the canon of literature.

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said the Children's Booker Prize will help to champion future classics written for children. It is also aimed as a social intervention, "designed to inspire more young people to read" and to support future generations of lifelong readers. The prize, she added, will form part of the movement to get children reading - "a cause that children, parents, carers, teachers and everyone in the world of storytelling can get behind."

The prize aims to support the work being done to encourage children's reading in a number of ways, including consulting with children to inform the ongoing development of the prize and involving children directly in judging so that the winning book is a peer-to-peer recommendation, as well as ensuring that more young people have access to new children's fiction through targeted gifting of the shortlisted and winning books, and creating effective campaigns to engage children outside of traditional book and educational spaces.

The Booker Prize Foundation will work with publishers and a range of partners, including the National Literary Trust, The Reading Agency, Bookbanks, and the Children's Book Project, to gift and deliver at least 30,000 copies of the shortlisted and winning books each year to children that need them the most. It will also work with the National Literacy Trust to measure longer term trends in children's reading.

Authors welcome the new award

The announcement of the Children's Booker Prize has been met with enthusiasm from key figures across the books world. Former Children's Laureate Joseph Coelho said, "I'm incredibly excited by the announcement of the Children's Booker Prize. This is a brilliant way to invite children into the world of words through a celebration of books, authors and illustrators. I fully welcome a robust prize that celebrates children's literature in a manner equal to that which adult literature receives and one that makes essential space for the voice of the child.'

Cressida Cowell, 'How to Train Your Dragon' author and a former Children's Laureate, added: 'Children are the toughest critics out there, so literature for children has to be created with the greatest expertise. It has to be exciting, adventurous, funny and wise." It comes at a time when the "stakes are high", she added, "because children have more competition for their time than ever before: children's authors and illustrators are fighting for the survival of a medium." 

Author and former Children's Laureate Malorie Blackman welcomed the inclusion of children as part of the judging process: "Children are an honest, discerning audience who deserve the very best stories and this award will highlight and celebrate the literary excellence to which they are entitled.' Jacqueline Wilson, Children's Laureate 2005-2007, added, "It's so dismaying that only 30% of today's children enjoy reading for pleasure - and yet there are so many exciting and enjoyable children's books out there, many sinking without trace. I think a Children's Booker Prize, like the Booker Prizes for adult fiction, will become a talking point, signposting more children, parents, carers and teachers to the best new children's literature.

Children's Booker Prize is a "gamechanger"

Bea Carvalho, head of books at Waterstones, said that the existing Booker Prizes provide bookshops with two of the most prestigious and impactful moments in the bookselling calendar, creating bestsellers and "setting the literary tone for the year ahead". Children's authors, she added, "deserve to be celebrated and this prize will be a gamechanger for any writers who are elevated by its shortlists." 

The Booker Prize, first awarded in 1969, is the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, bringing recognition to outstanding fiction and its authors. The 2024 winner Orbital by Samantha Harvey sold over 20,000 print copies in the UK in the week following its win on 12 November 2024, making it the fastest selling winner of the Booker Prize since records began, and the nominated and winning children's books can also expect a huge boost in sales.

The nominated children's books could also enter into a tradition of Booker Prizes adaptations. More than 74 books that have been longlisted or shortlisted for the Booker or International Booker Prize have been adapted for the big or small screen over the years, ranging from The Remains of the Day to The Handmaid's Tale, Wolf Hall and Life of Pi.

Find out more at The Booker Prizes website.  @TheBookerPrizes #ChildrensBookerPrize

The founding partner and principal funder of the Children's Booker Prize is AKO Foundation, a grant-giving charitable foundation focused on supporting charities that improve education and the wellbeing of young people, promote the arts, and combat the climate emergency. AKO Foundation has committed to supporting the prize for its first three years.