Britain's most prestigious literary prize is getting a younger sibling. The Booker Prize Foundation announced Friday that it is setting up the Children's Booker Prize alongside its existing awards for English-language and translated fiction. Like its sister prizes, the children's award comes with a $67,000 purse, reports the AP. The prize will open for submissions early next year and the inaugural award will be handed out in 2027, with the winner picked by a jury of children and adults led by writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Britain's current children's laureate.
Cottrell-Boyce, whose books include the Carnegie Medal-winning Millions, said he was "buzzing" about the prospect. "It's going to be—as they say—absolute scenes in there. Let the yelling commence," he said. Funded by the arts, environment, and education charity AKO Foundation, the new award will be open to fiction from any country aimed at children aged 8 to 12, either written in English or translated, and published in the UK or Ireland. Booker Prize Foundation Chief Executive Gaby Wood said the prize aimed to inspire more young people to read and be "a seed from which we hope future generations of lifelong readers will grow."
The original Booker Prize was founded in 1969 and has established a reputation for transforming writers' careers. Its winners have included Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, and Hilary Mantel. This year's winner will be announced on Nov. 10. The International Booker Prize was established in 2005 as a lifetime achievement award. Since 2016, it has gone to a single work of translated fiction, with the prize money split between author and translator.
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