The Booker Prize Foundation has announced a £50,000 award for children’s fiction, the first of its kind from the U.K.-based organization that awards the Booker Prize and International Booker Prize.
The Children's Booker Prize will be awarded annually beginning with its first presentation in February 2027. The prize will celebrate the best contemporary fiction for children aged eight to 12 years old, written in or translated into English and published in the U.K. or Ireland. The award will be selected by a combined panel of children and adult judges, headed in 2027 by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the U.K.'s 2024–2026 Waterstones Children's Laureate.
"The Children’s Booker Prize is the most ambitious endeavor we’ve embarked on in 20 years—and we hope its impact will resonate for decades to come," said Gaby Wood, CEO of the Booker Prize Foundation. "It aims to be several things at once: an award that will champion future classics written for children; a social intervention designed to inspire more young people to read; and a seed from which we hope future generations of lifelong readers will grow."
Industry professionals, who have watched the already spare landscape of U.K. children's book awards thin out even more in recent years, are welcoming the prize with open arms. The prestigious Costa Book Awards (formerly the Whitbread Awards), which had a children's category, were discontinued in June 2022, shortly followed by the Blue Peter Awards, a children's-book focused prize, which disappeared in July 2022. And the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize was halted after 2016.
"I am hugely excited about the launch of the Children’s Booker Prize," said Cressida Cowell, the 2019–2022 Waterstone Children's Laureate. "Children are the toughest critics out there.... And the stakes are the highest they’ve ever been, because children have more competition for their time than ever before: children’s authors and illustrators are fighting for the survival of a medium."
Among the U.K.'s existing children's book awards, the Booker Prize comes with the highest cash prize and the adult Bookers have a robust track record of boosting sales for winners. In 2024, Samantha Harvey's Orbital saw sales spike 3,867% in the U.K. from the time the novel was longlisted to eight weeks after its win, and the number of translation rights deals increased from eight to a current total of 44 territories, per the Booker Foundation.
In addition, Wood hopes that the Children’s Booker Prize will inspire more reading for pleasure among U.K. children; the percentage of U.K. children who pick up books in their free time is at its lowest in 20 years. The announcement also comes just ahead of the the U.K. government and National Literacy Trust's National Year of Reading 2026.
"The Children’s Booker Prize is not just a prize—it’s part of a movement: a cause that children, parents, teachers, and everyone in the world of storytelling can get behind," Wood added. "We’re delighted that Frank Cottrell-Boyce, master storyteller and passionate advocate, will be the inaugural chair of the judges. And we can’t wait to hear the views of the ultimate judges of the quality of children’s fiction: children themselves."
