Beth O’Brien won both the Carnegie Medal for Writing and its Shadowers’ Choice Award for Writing for Wolf Siren, her feminist reimagining of Red Riding Hood. The debut novel draws on her experience of visual impairment and examines power, accessibility, grief and injustice. O’Brien received a £5,000 award at the live-streamed ceremony on 23 June.
Kate Rolfe received the Carnegie Medal for Illustration for Wiggling Words, a picture book using typography and contrasting colours to convey a dyslexic reader’s movement from confusion towards confidence. Aimée de Jongh’s adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies: The Graphic Novel won the Shadowers’ Choice Medal for Illustration at the Cambridge Theatre ceremony, attended by more than 600 young people. The awards’ work with the RNIB and Calibre Audio also made shortlisted books available in alternative formats where possible.
Patrice Lawrence has succeeded Frank Cottrell-Boyce as Waterstones Children’s Laureate 2026 to 2028. She received the silver Laureate medal at the Barbican and plans to make shared reading, belonging and community connection central to her two-year term. Poet, author and broadcaster Lemn Sissay hosted the announcement on 7 July.
Lawrence also intends to build an evidence base for the value of reading together, drawing on conversations with children and adults from varied backgrounds. Her voluntary-sector experience, including work with families of prisoners and the National Children’s Bureau, will shape work with people who feel undervalued or pushed aside. Lawrence said she wants to recognise the people who quietly create reading communities as well as those who take part in them.
John Agard became the first poet to win the CLiPPA three times when The Poetry World of John Agard, illustrated by Shirley Hottier, took the 2026 prize. The collection brings together 80 poems from his earlier career, including work shaped by his Caribbean childhood. Agard previously shared the 2003 prize with Grace Nichols and won again in 2009 with The Young Inferno, illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura.
The award ceremony at the National Theatre included performances by Agard and fellow shortlisted poets Sam Gayton, Simon Mole, Sean Taylor and Traci N. Todd, alongside primary pupils. More than 600 schools and 120,000 children joined the CLiPPA Shadowing Scheme during the National Year of Reading.
Wolf Siren also won the 11 to 14+ category at the UKLA Book Awards, which are judged by teachers. Alistair Chisholm’s futuristic Edinburgh story Reek won the 7 to 10+ category, while Alex Latimer’s interactive picture book Don’t Think of Tigers took the 3 to 6+ award.
Isabel Thomas and Daniel Egnéus won the information category with Frog. The shadowers selected Jason Reynolds’ Twenty-Four Seconds from Now, J. P. Rose’s Birdie, Eoin McLaughlin and Guilherme Karsten’s Once I Was a Tree, and Edward Ross’s Graphic Novel Builder. Eighty-five teacher judges took part before a final panel of 12 selected the category winners.
Asli Jensen and editor Shalini Vallepur won the Branford Boase Award for Love on Sight, a contemporary YA romance set on a London council estate. The novel follows two young people negotiating cultural and religious expectations, family responsibilities and their own relationship.
Jensen wrote much of the book while working in the youth justice system, and young people she met there influenced the story. The award, founded in memory of Henrietta Branford and editor Wendy Boase, recognises the editor alongside the debut novelist and runs with the Henrietta Branford Writing Competition for writers under 18. Jensen received £1,000, and both winners collected engraved trophies at the CLPE ceremony on 8 July.
Owning It: Our disabled childhoods in our own words, by James Catchpole, Lucy Catchpole and Jen Campbell, with illustrations by Sophie Kamlish, won the 13 to 16 category and the judges’ overall prize at the Information Book Award. The collection presents disabled childhood experiences through personal accounts and illustration.
Polly Faber and Klas Fahlén won the under-seven judges’ category with Recycling Day: What happens to the things we throw away?, while Jules Howard and Gordy Wright’s Choose Your Own Evolution won the 8 to 12 judges’ award and the overall Children’s Choice. More than 1,100 pupils took part in the award’s book club, with Frog and Anu Adebogun’s It’s a Brave Young World, illustrated by Soofiya and Lila Cruz, also winning Children’s Choice categories. Children from three schools presented prizes at the London ceremony, hosted by author and bookseller Tamara McFarlane.
The Poetry By Heart Grand Finale brought 40 Classic finalists and 12 Freestyle groups to Shakespeare’s Globe after 146,000 young people learned a poem. One in four state secondary schools and more than 1,000 primary schools in England took part, along with ten teachers in the All School Staff competition.
Oliver Daniels, Albie Costain, Adam Hawkesworth and Daniella Amaebtie became the four Classic national champions with poems by Roald Dahl, T. S. Eliot, Simon Armitage and D. H. Lawrence. Freestyle honours went to Zidaan Aslam and Kairo Blumenthal, while Pip Holmes won the staff category with Marianne Moore’s Poetry; Kingfisher Academy, five Ministry of Defence schools in Cyprus and St Nicholas Priory Primary School received special awards. The Cyprus recognition covered a collective of five Ministry of Defence schools working through uncertainty and upheaval.
The Royal Literary Fund marked the centenary of Winnie-the-Pooh by hosting its patron, Her Majesty The Queen, at Ashdown Forest for her first official engagement in the role. During the celebration, she played Poohsticks with Julia Donaldson, Axel Scheffler, Cerrie Burnell, Jane Riordan and Sita Brahmachari, using sticks from Buckingham Palace gardens.
The Queen also met pupils from Ashdown Primary School and unveiled the all-weather Queen’s Walk, intended to improve access to the forest. A. A. Milne left rights in his books to the Royal Literary Fund, his family and other organisations, and his estate has generated £91 million since 1972 for grants, education and outreach. The visit also included the Gills Lap memorial to Milne and illustrator E. H. Shepard, where pupils presented local flowers.
Sue Palmer’s The Shell Secret won the young adult fiction class and the Ann Trevenen Jenkin Cup at the Holyer an Gof Publishers’ Awards, as well as the children’s authorship prize. The children’s shortlists also included Anna C. Wilson and Maria Floyd’s A Dog Called Dreckly, Michelle Cartlidge’s A Very Sparkly Mousehole Christmas, Lilac Rosenwyn’s Waves of Mischief and Stephen Polglase’s The Last Giants of Kernow. Palmer also learnt that her great-grandfather had been made a Cornish bard in the 1940s for work on the Cornish dictionary.
Smith Street Books has launched Little Smith, a children’s imprint focused on illustrated books, original design and emerging talent. Its first title, Michelle Mackintosh and Cat Rabbit’s felt-art picture book Fuzzy Feelings, explores emotions, while Gaia Stella’s paper-collage If I Were a Plant examines the natural world and follows her board books Yum! and Slurp!.
The autumn list adds Stella’s cut-out-and-paste Bibi Makes series on 1 October, Dr Vienna Tran’s solar-system title Space Explorers on 10 September, and Dr Charlotte Birkmanis’s Wonders of the Wild: Sharks on the same date. Little Smith’s first year therefore ranges from felt feelings and paper plants to sandwiches, planets and sharks, which is a fair amount of shelf traffic for one small imprint. Smith Street Books, based in Melbourne, says it produces more than 65 titles a year.
