Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2026 winners announced

Picture book Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob, created by Huw Aaron, has been named Overall Winner of the Waterstones Children's Book Prize

The shortlisted and winning books are voted for by Waterstones booksellers. The overall prize includes a £5,000 award and the promise of ongoing commitment to the winner's writing and illustrating career by Waterstones book stores.

Last year's winner, The Café at the Edge of the Woods by Mikey Please, went on to be Waterstones' bestselling picture book of 2025.

Bea Carvalho, head of Books at Waterstones, said the chain's booksellers hailed Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob by overall winner Huw Aaron "an instant bedtime story classic", with its dreamy, painterly style and sweet rhyming text. "This is a gorgeously cosy tale which puts an adorable spin on all things spooky with bags of charm and a hilarious and monstrously cute supporting cast. Blob is a character for the picture book hall-of-fame." The other category winners were Evie and Maryam's Family Tree and A Language of Dragons.

Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob is described by the judges as a "hilarious and imaginative rhyming story, featuring truly monstrous, yet strangely familiar bedtime routines that will delight sleepy little creatures everywhere". Rosie from Waterstones Bracknell described Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob as a "truly brilliant bedtime story full of love", whilst Eilish from Waterstones Rustington said it "feels like an instant classic". 

Huw Aaron was nominated not only for his winning title, Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob in the Illustrated Books category, but also for Unfairies in the Younger Readers category, marking the first time in the award's history that an author has been shortlisted for two different titles at the same time.

Huw is a Welsh cartoonist, author, and illustrator from Swansea, now living in Cardiff. After a short career in finance, Huw found a niche as a cartoonist, producing joke cartoons for, among others, Private Eye, Prospect and The Spectator and presented the weekly art programme, Cer i Greu on S4C.

Category winners

Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob won the Illustrated Books category before going on to secure the accolade of Overall Winner of the Prize, alongside Evie and Maryam's Family Tree which won the Younger Readers category and A Language of Dragons which took the category for Older Readers.

The winner of the Younger Readers category is Evie and Maryam's Family Tree by Janeen Hayat, a warm and human contemporary story following the budding friendship between two girls, Evie and Maryam, with flashbacks to Evie and Maryam's family during the Partition of India. Following in the footsteps of a previous Waterstones Children's Book Prize winner (The Cats We Meet Along the Way), Evie and Maryam's Family Tree won the Guppy Books Open Submission competition in 2023.

Rachel from Waterstones Canterbury described Evie and Maryam's Family Tree as a "fascinating piece of history that isn't written about enough", and Morag from Waterstones Edinburgh renjoyed the setting of this story and that there are "family mysteries and secret codes to solve".

Janeen Hayat grew up in Florida and now lives in London. She's half-Pakistani, half-New-Yorker, and is passionate about creating characters that are many things at once because she knows she is not alone in being a tangled mass of identities, always changing. When she's not writing, she is advocating for an education system that gives every child a fair chance.

The winner of the category for Older Readers, A Language of Dragons by S.F. Williamson, is set in an alternate 1920s London. As civil war threatens a fragile truce between humans and dragons, Vivien Featherswallow's parents are arrested. So when a lifeline is offered in the form of a mysterious 'job', she grabs it. Arriving at Bletchley Park, Viv discovers that she has been recruited as a codebreaker helping the war effort - if she succeeds, she and her family can all go home again. If she doesn't, they'll all die. Denise and Grace from Waterstones Bromley said that A Language of Dragons is "everything you need in an exciting adventure: intrigue, backstabbing, and a little magic", and Millie from Waterstones Colchester called it "the perfect dose of escapism".

S.F. Williamson is originally from Kent and now lives in France. She is fascinated by the way languages are born and was surrounded by them long before she undertook a degree in French and Italian. She has always known that languages are creatures that live and move and breathe, and as a child she learned that speaking them meant accessing ideas, traditions and people she would only otherwise know from a distance.