# Booker Prize Foundation launches Children’s Booker Prize

The Booker Prize Foundation has launched a new Children’s Booker Prize, offering £50,000 for the best fiction written for readers aged eight to 12, according to the supplied Guardian report. The first winner will be announced in early 2027. The event date is 2025-10-24.

The announcement marks a major expansion for one of the world’s best-known literary prizes. The new award will focus on contemporary children’s fiction written in or translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. The evidence packet says the prize will open for submissions in spring 2026, with the shortlist and child judges announced in November 2026.

One of the most distinctive features of the prize is that children will help decide the winner. The Foundation plans to use a mixed panel of adult and child judges, with Frank Cottrell-Boyce serving as inaugural chair. The Guardian report says he will be joined by two other adult judges, who will help create a shortlist of eight books before three child judges are recruited to participate in the final decision.

That structure is new for a Booker award and gives the prize a more participatory shape than the adult contests. It also fits the Foundation’s stated goal of encouraging reading for pleasure among younger audiences. The packet notes that children’s reading for pleasure is at its lowest level in 20 years, a concern that gives the new award a policy and cultural dimension beyond simple prize-giving.

The Foundation is also pledging to gift 30,000 copies of shortlisted and winning books to children each year, in partnership with the National Literacy Trust, The Reading Agency, Bookbanks and the Children’s Book Project. That is a substantial distribution effort and suggests the prize is intended as both an industry accolade and a reading campaign.

The packet includes comments from leading children’s authors who welcomed the initiative, including former children’s laureates Malorie Blackman, Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Morpurgo, Cressida Cowell, Anne Fine and Joseph Coelho. Their endorsements point to broad sector support, though NeoTechNews is not reproducing the quoted language at length.

The Guardian report also quotes Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, calling the prize the organization’s most ambitious endeavour in 20 years. That framing matters because it places the Children’s Booker alongside the Foundation’s other major awards and signals a long-term commitment rather than a one-off campaign.

For readers, the practical takeaway is clear. A new major prize is coming, it will reward books for eight- to 12-year-olds, it will involve child judges, and it will carry a £50,000 winner’s award. In a literary market where children’s books often compete for attention with adult fiction and streaming entertainment, the Foundation is making a direct bet on young readers.