LONDON: The jury for the inaugural 2027 Children’s Booker Prize was unveiled on Tuesday, including a British Indian bookseller behind a popular children’s bookstore in north London.
Sanchita Basu De Sarkar, owner of the award-winning children’s bookstore in Muswell Hill, will join British Children’s Award winner Frank Cottrell-Boyce and actor Lolly Adefope to select the best contemporary novels for children aged 8 to 12.
As with the annual Booker Prize, the winner of the Children’s Edition will receive £50,000, and the shortlisted authors will each receive £2,500. The inaugural Children’s Booker Prize will be awarded on 2 February 2027 to a work written in or translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland.
“It brings together everything I love: reading a lot of children’s books, talking about those books with some really amazing people, and sharing those books with kids across the country so we can continue the conversation,” said Sanchita Basu De Sarkar, co-founder of the South Asia Illustration and Literature Festival.
The adults on the judging panel will be joined by child judges, who will be selected through a UK-wide competition that kicks off this week.
“Judging with kids will be a completely unique experience and one of the things I’m most excited about about Booker for Kids,” said Basud Sarkar.
“One of my favorite events in the bookstore is our book club events – children are some of the most passionate and opinionated readers, and I always gain a new perspective every time we sit down to discuss books together. We all walk away with ideas. It’s a great way to celebrate National Year of Reading,” she said.
An adult jury will select a shortlist of eight books, which will be announced on 24 November. Three UK-based children’s judges aged between 8 and 12 will work with them to select the winning book, as part of a process designed to involve children directly in the results and ensure the winning book is one that young readers will recommend to their peers.
“I’ve been asked to find three children who love books to join me in judging the inaugural Children’s Booker Prize. Whether you’ve read one book this year or a hundred; whether you like comic books or thick chapter books; books with lots of pictures, books with no pictures; it doesn’t matter, you might just be the judge we’re looking for,” said Cottrell-Boyce, the multi-award-winning children’s book author and screenwriter, in a video encouraging children to apply for the role.
Parents, carers and educators enter online to enter on behalf of their children, pupils and young people, with names to be announced alongside the shortlist later this year. In an online form, children will be asked to share why they want to be a Children’s Booker Prize judge and answer questions about books and reading.
Successful child entrants will each receive: a copy of the eight shortlisted books to read and save; a judges medal; a “fun day out” to London to work with the adult judges to select the winner; a bespoke portrait by ‘Beano’ illustrator Nigel Parkinson; a ‘Beano’ comic documenting their judging experience; and a return trip to London for a ceremony at London’s Young V&A.
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said: “Behind this new prize is a social mission: to develop the next generation of lifelong readers. We are confident that if we have the best, we can inspire children.”
“By ‘best’ we mean books that readers will love, books that can be read again and again or enjoyed just once. Books that contain great characters, emotion, wisdom, action, adventure, imagination and magic. Books that take readers to other places – in the world, in their heads or in their hearts,” she said.
The new Children’s Booker Prize is open to authors from all over the world, including original English books and English translations, with the prize shared equally between the author, translator and/or illustrator.
The first three years of the new award are supported by the AKO Foundation, a grant-making entity dedicated to supporting charities that improve the education and well-being of young people. The Booker Prize Foundation said it will work with publishers and partners to gift and deliver 30,000 shortlisted and winning books each year to children who need it most. PTI AK RD
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