24 November 2015

Children's Book Award - Readers needed!

You are invited to read all 3 of the shortlisted books in the Older Readers category of the 2016 Children's Book Award so you can rate them 1, 2, 3. Your vote will count towards the award, as this is the only award where children decide who wins. You need to read the books between November 2015 and the end of April 2016.

The shortlist for the Children’s Book Award 2016 Older Readers category is as follows:

– Apple and Rain by Sarah Crossan (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
– Smart by Kim Slater (Macmillan Children’s Books)
– Listen to the Moon by Michael Morpurgo (HarperCollins Children’s Books)

About the Award

The Children’s Book Award (previously known as the Red House Children’s Book Award) is the only national award for children’s books that is voted for entirely by children themselves. It was founded in 1980 and each year since then children in book groups and around the UK have been reading as many new books as they can and voting to pick both the shortlist and the eventual winners. Past winners include J.K. Rowling, Patrick Ness, Andy Stanton, Malorie Blackman, Anthony Horowitz and Oliver Jeffers. Now in its 36th year, the award has often been the first to recognise the future stars of children’s fiction and has the ability to turn popular authors into bestsellers.

In 2015 this involved 800 books being submitted, with 48,000 votes for the shortlist alone and a grand total of over 80,000 votes being cast. Through the school's membership of the Oxford Children's Book Group 'Testing Group' several OLA students test-read and voted for the books which were in the Top 3 Older readers category. Two lucky OLA readers were invited to the Awards ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London in February 2015. They also attended lunch with the shortlisted authors and illustrators and talked to then Children's Laureate Malorie Blackman.

The shortlist for the Children’s Book Award 2016 Younger Readers and Younger Children's categories:

Younger Readers
– My Headteacher is a Vampire Rat! by Pamela Butchart and Thomas Flintham (Nosy Crow)
– Boy in the Tower by Polly Ho-Yen (Doubleday)
– Horrid Henry’s Krazy Ketchup by Francesca Simon and Tony Ross (Orion Children’s Books)

Younger Children

– Fabulous Pie by Gareth Edwards and Guy Parker-Rees (Scholastic)
– Is There a Dog in this Book? by Viviane Schwarz (Walker Books)
– Ready, Steady, Jump! by Jeanne Willis and Adrian Reynolds (Andersen Press)
– This Book Just Ate my Dog! by Richard Byrne (Oxford University Press)

Source and more information