Children’s Booker Prize hopes to encourage younger people to read more books

17 November 2025

The Booker Prize, which recognises English language novels published in the United Kingdom and Ireland, has unveiled a new award: the Children’s Booker Prize, which will be awarded for the first time in 2027.

The Children’s Booker Prize, which will launch in 2026 and be awarded annually from 2027, will celebrate the best contemporary fiction for children aged eight to 12 years old, written in or translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. 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.

This is good news all around. Not only will the Children’s Booker encourage more younger people to read, it will also support authors with an enticement to write more stories for children. The more literary awards there are, the better it is for literature, writing, and reading, as a whole.