Submissions are now open for the 11th Little Rebels Award for Radical Children’s Fiction, worth £2000 to the winner.
The Little Rebels Award celebrates UK children’s books for readers age 0-12 which promote social equality and social justice. Last year’s prize went to Sarah Hagger-Holt for Proud of Me (Usborne Books 2021), a coming-of-age novel which threads through themes of cross-generational responses to LGBTQ+ identities, religious-based homophobia and the legacy of Section 28. Previous winners include Zanib Mian, A. M. Dassu and Catherine Johnson.
The prize administrators said, “This year has really seen the Little Rebels Award up its game. It was wonderful to be able to return to an in-person award night back in July, even if an inconvenient heat wave prompted a dramatic overnight timetable shuffle! And, thanks to the additional funding provided to us by the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust, we were able to produce lots of additional materials, including reading guides, to support schools and libraries in drawing out the key social justice issues in each of the shortlisted texts. Our aim to bring radical, political, social-justice-minded, thought provoking fiction into classrooms and into the hands of the youngest readers has really gathered apace”.
Judges for 2023 are: Gay’s the Word bookshop manager, Jim MacSweeney; author-illustrator, Emily Haworth-Booth; reading development and children’s book consultant, Jake Hope; Research and Development Director at the Centre for Literature in Primary Education (CLPE), Farrah Serroukh. A fifth judge will be confirmed at a later date.
The Little Rebels Award is given on behalf of the Alliance of Radical Booksellers.
Full submissions guidelines can be found here. The closing date is 19th January 2023.
The Little Rebels Children’s Book Award 