The Department for Education is investing £5 million to help state-funded secondary schools in England buy books and reading materials for reading for pleasure as part of the National Year of Reading 2026. Eligible schools with pupils in Key Stages 3 and Key Stage 4 do not need to apply and will receive allocations of between £450 and £1,400, weighted by school size and disadvantage, to spend by 31 March 2027. Schools can choose print books, comics and graphic novels, ebooks, audiobooks and accessible formats including large print and braille, but the funding cannot be used for core curriculum materials, textbooks, catch-up resources, devices, staffing or library furniture.
A major study of disability representation in UK children’s books has found that 10% of titles published for three to 11-year-olds in 2024 featured disabled people in some way. The Reflecting Disability study, funded by Arts Council England with analysis by The Reading Agency, also found that 67% of books reviewed contained at least one barrier to reading, including design, layout, text or language issues. This disabled-led project, facilitated by Beth Cox and Alexandra Strick, plans a toolkit later this year with further analysis and practical guidance for publishers and creators.
World Book Day has revealed its 2027 £1 and €1.50 books ahead of its 30th anniversary on 4 March. The line-up spans beginning, early and fluent readers, with titles including Selina Brown’s This Is My Music, Ken Wilson-Max’s Norton Follows His Nose, Steve Cole’s Astrosaurs: Turbo Time Twist, Farhana Islam’s The Misadventures of Mina Mahmood: Bake it Till You Make It and Pari Thomson’s Greenwild: The Castle Under the Mountain. For the first time, the £1 and €1.50 selection includes Scottish Gaelic titles alongside books in Irish and Welsh.
The children’s categories at the Wainwright Prize have recognised nature writing across fiction, non-fiction and picture books. Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands: An Illustrated Journey Through Earth’s Lost Worlds, illustrated by Gavin Scott, is the 2026 Children’s Wainwright Prize Book of the Year and children’s non-fiction winner, while Caryl Lewis’s The Danger of Small Things wins children’s fiction and Annie Booker’s The Great Bear takes the picture book award. M.G. Leonard’s The Adventures of Portly the Otter, illustrated by Polly Dunbar, Kate Winter’s The Cave Explorer and Greg Stobbs’ Isla & The Sky were highly commended in the children’s categories.
Josh Silver has won the YA Book Prize 2026 with Traumaland, published by Rock the Boat, after the result was announced at Edinburgh International Book Festival. The psychological thriller follows Eli, who is left emotionally numb after a near-fatal car crash and enters an underground club offering virtual reality simulations of nightmarish scenarios. Silver said the award meant “the absolute world” to him and described YA as his first journey into publishing.
Forest Xiao has won the £5,000 Klaus Flugge Prize for Seven Babies, her Walker Books picture book about seven babies arriving unexpectedly at a home. Xiao drew on her experiences as a new mother, with much of the babies’ behaviour inspired by real life observed at playgroups, children’s centres, playgrounds, parks and other activities. The prize recognises a published picture book by a debut illustrator, and this year’s judges included Rob Biddulph and 2025 winner Emma Farrarons.
The third annual Michael Rosen Day will take place on 12 November with the theme Silly School Stuff. Schools and home educators can register for a free livestreamed poetry event for ages five to 11, alongside free resources, the 2026 Silly School Stuff poetry competition and Michael Rosen’s Manifesto for Reading. Last year, 382,000 children were registered for the livestream, and this year’s event forms part of the National Year of Reading.
More than 20% of UK school pupils are recorded as using more than one language, while more than 300 languages are spoken across the population, yet translations and bilingual children’s books remain comparatively rare. A new University of Reading hybrid festival, The Languages of Children’s Books, will bring publishers, translators, librarians, researchers and literacy advocates together on 17 September as part of the National Year of Reading and World Kid Lit Month. Speakers include Jake Hope, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor, while Sarah Ardizzone and Anam Zafar will lead workshops; all panels will be streamed online and online attendance is free.
Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s Gruffalo Granny launched with a British Library event and a dedicated Waterstones Piccadilly pop-up that will run until Christmas. Macmillan Children’s Books has an initial print run of 1.5 million copies across all editions and is giving 75,000 copies to children in disadvantaged communities across the UK. Braille, British Sign Language and a bespoke audio tactile edition developed with Living Paintings were published alongside the standard editions, while a British Library event was streamed to 6,000 schools.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is set to launch in Selby, providing registered families with a free book by post each month from birth until a child’s fifth birthday. The scheme forms part of the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority’s £400,000 Cradle to Career programme, with a second pilot focused on baby boxes in Scarborough. Parton, who died on 25 August aged 80, founded the book-gifting scheme in tribute to her father, who could not read.
Primary school teacher Richard Ganjavi has written Whispers of a Purple Butterfly after the stillbirth of his daughter Bella in August 2024. The book, aimed at eight to 12-year-olds, centres on Lucy, a fictional 10-year-old surviving twin, and Ganjavi hopes charities, teachers and therapists can use it with people dealing with baby loss. Midwife Holly Hawkesford, whose son Jasper died seven hours after birth in 2014, runs Jasper’s Rainbow and hopes to work with Ganjavi on awareness; the Office for National Statistics recorded a stillbirth rate of 3.9 per 1,000 total births in England and Wales in 2024.
HarperCollins UK is giving £21,000 to 21 independent bookshops through The Bookshop I’d Like to Thank, part of the National Year of Reading. Each shop receives £1,000 after being nominated by a HarperCollins author or illustrator who felt the bookseller had supported their work through recommendations, events, special editions or displays. The Accidental Bookshop in Alnwick plans to use some of its funding for an intergenerational story-time project linking a local school and care home, including a children’s library for the home.
Sophy Henn’s Your Name Here will be published by New Modern Arcade on 22 October at £9.99 in paperback, for ages eight and over and aimed at eight to 13-year-olds. The book uses prompts, questions and space for writing and drawing to give young people an analogue outlet for creativity, self-expression and reflection. Henn says the idea developed from news of a forthcoming social media ban for young people and the possibility that it could remove one space used for self-expression and discovery.
The New Adult Book Prize has announced its 10-book 2026 shortlist in association with Cheltenham Literature Festival, where the winner will be revealed through the festival’s VOICEBOX programme. The list comprises Samantha Shannon’s Among the Burning Flowers, BK Borison’s And Now, Back to You, Sarah Mughal Rana’s Dawn of the Firebird, Nikita Gill’s Hekate, Emily Slapper’s It Might Never Happen, Lucas Oakeley’s Nearly Departed, Caragh Maxwell’s Sugartown, Beth O’Leary’s Swept Away, Grace Walker’s The Merge and Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo’s The Tiny Things Are Heavier. The winner will be announced at the festival.
