London, The judging panel of the inaugural Children’s Booker Prize 2027 was unveiled on Tuesday, which includes a British Indian bookseller behind a popular children’s bookshop in north London.
Sanchita Basu De Sarkar, who owns the award winning Children’s Bookshop in Muswell Hill, will join UK Children’s Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce and actor Lolly Adefope to select the best contemporary fiction for children aged eight to 12 years old.
As with the annual Booker Prize, the winner of the children’s version of the literary award will win GBP 50,000 and the shortlisted authors will receive GBP 2,500 each. The first Children’s Booker Prize will be awarded on February 2, 2027, to a work written in or translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.
“It brings together everything I love: reading loads of children’s books, getting to discuss them with some utterly brilliant people, and sharing the books with children all over the country so we can continue the conversation,” said Sanchita Basu De Sarkar, co-founder of the South Asian Illustration and Literature Festival.
The adults on the panel will be joined by child judges, to be selected through a UK-wide competition which also opened this week.
“Judging with the children is going to be a completely unique experience, and one of the things I’m most excited about for the Children’s Booker,” said Basu De Sarkar.
“One of my favourite activities in the bookshop is our book club sessions – children make for the most passionate and opinionated readers, and whenever we sit down and discuss books together, I’m always gaining new perspectives. We all come away buzzing with ideas. What a fabulous way to celebrate the National Year of Reading,” she said.
The adult panel is charged with selecting a shortlist of eight books to be announced on November 24. Three child judges, aged between eight and 12 years old and living in the UK, will then join them in choosing the winning book as part of a process designed to give children a direct voice in the outcome and ensure the winning book is a recommendation from young readers to their peers.
“I’ve been asked to find three book-loving kids to join me in judging the first-ever Children’s Booker Prize. Whether you’ve read one book this year or a hundred; whether you love comic books or big thick chapter books; books with loads of pictures, books with no pictures; it doesn’t matter, YOU could be exactly the judge that we’re looking for,” multi-award-winning children’s book author and screenwriter Cottrell-Boyce said in a video encouraging children to apply for the role.
Online entries are invited from parents, carers and educators on behalf of their children, pupils and young people, with the names to be unveiled alongside the shortlist later this year. In the online form, children will be asked to share why they would like to be a Children’s Booker Prize judge and answer questions about books and reading.
The successful child entrants will each get: the eight shortlisted books to read and keep; a judges’ medal; a trip to London for a “fun day” choosing the winner with the adult judges; a bespoke portrait by ‘Beano’ illustrator Nigel Parkinson; a ‘Beano’ comic strip capturing their judging experience; and another trip to London for the ceremony at the Young V&A in London.
“This new prize is underpinned by a social mission: to create future generations of lifelong readers. We feel confident that we can enthuse children if we are armed with the very best,” said Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation.
“By ‘best’, we mean books that readers will love, books that can be read over and over again or enjoyed just once. Books that contain great characters, emotion, wit, action, adventure, imagination, and magic. Books that take readers to other places – in the world, in their minds or in their hearts,” she said.
The new Children’s Booker is open to authors worldwide, both for books written originally in English and for those translated into English, with the prize money to be equally split between author, translator and/or illustrator.
The first three years of the new prize are backed by the AKO Foundation, a grant-giving entity focused on supporting charities that improve the education and well-being of young people. The Booker Prize Foundation said it will be working with publishers and partners to gift and deliver 30,000 copies of the shortlisted and winning books each year to children who need them the most. PTI AK RD
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