Booker Prize To Launch Children’s Award In 2026

The Booker Prize is not just the UK’s most prestigious literary award, it’s up there with the Pulitzer and even the Nobel Prize in Literature as one of the industry’s most recognisable and esteemed accolades in the world. And while we patiently await the winner of the 2025 prize (more on that below), new news has emerged from The Booker Foundation, the charity that arranges the prize. 

A new prize is set to launch next year, celebrating the best contemporary fiction penned for a younger audience, aged between eight and 12 years old, titled the Children’s Booker Prize. Think authors like Malorie Blackman, Cressida Cowell, Michael Morpurgo and Jacqueline Wilson, all of whom are backing Booker’s new move.

Unlike the standard Booker Prize (which awards works written in English) and its sister award the International Booker Prize (which awards works in translation to English), the Children’s Booker Prize will not be funded by Crankstart, the charitable foundation of Sir Michael Moritz KBE and his late wife Harriet Heyman (which is also helping to fund the National Gallery’s new wing). Instead AKO Foundation is funding the new prize which, like the others, is worth £50,000. (Founded by Norwegian billionaire Nicolai Tangen, AKO Foundation is the charitable arm of AKO Capital, and funnels funds to education and youth wellbeing initiatives, the promotion of the arts and combatting the climate crisis.) And in another slight difference, the Children’s Booker Prize will be open to works both written in and translated into English, merging the scope of both existing prizes.

The news follows the Women’s Prize Foundation recently expanding its scope to introduce a new prize for Non-Fiction to be awarded alongside its existing prestigious Fiction prize. The first Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction was awarded to Dr Rachel Clark earlier this year for her organ donation narrative, Story of a Heart, announced concurrently with the winner of the Fiction prize, Yael van der Wouden with The Safekeep. So why is Booker skirting past non-fiction and opting for a children’s prize instead? The Prize’s chief exec Gaby Wood describes the prize as ‘several things at once: an award that will champion future classics written for children; a social intervention designed to inspire more young people to read; and a seed from which we hope future generations of lifelong readers will grow’.

‘In other words,’ Gaby continues, ‘the Children’s Booker Prize is not just a prize – it’s part of a movement: a cause that children, parents, carers, teachers and everyone in the world of storytelling can get behind.’

The news comes as reading reaches record lows in the UK, with the government and National Literacy Trust launching a National Year for Reading in 2026 in an attempt to bring books back to the fore. As well as awarding the author £50,000, the Booker Foundation will donate at least 30,000 copies of the shortlisted and winning books so more children can own and read some of the world’s very best fiction.

According to the Booker Foundation, submissions for the inaugural prize will open in spring 2026, with the judging panel helmed by UK Children’s Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce. Frank will be joined by two more adult judges, with a shortlist of eight books revealed in November 2026. The adults will then be joined by three children who will be recruited to whittle the shortlist down to one winner, who will be revealed in February 2027.

‘Every child deserves the chance to experience the happiness that diving into a great book can bring,’ Frank says. ‘The Children’s Booker Prize will make it easier for children to find the book that speaks to them.

‘By inviting them to the judging table, and by gifting copies of the nominated books, it will bring thousands more children into the wonderful world of reading,’ he adds. ‘I am absolutely buzzing about the news that I’m going to be chairing the judging panel. It’s going to be – as they say – absolute scenes in there. Let the yelling commence.’

Samantha Harvey wins the 2024 Booker Prize with Orbital

The 2025 Booker Prize Shortlist

This year’s winner of the Booker Foundation’s flagship award, The Booker Prize, will be revealed on Monday 10 November, with the author receiving a £50,000 prize (all shortlistees also receive £2,500).

The six shortlisted novels span 200 to 700 pages, and include a previous winner (Kiran Desai, 2006), two former shortlistees (Andrew Miller and David Szalay) along with three authors making their Booker debut.

The 2025 Booker Prize shortlist is as follows:

• Flesh by David Szalay
• The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
• The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
• Audition by Katie Kitamura
• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
• Flashlight by Susan Choi

Flesh – Szalay’s fifth novel and second to be Booker shortlisted after All That Man Is (2016) – was the C&TH book club pick in March 2025. He told Belinda Bamber: ‘From the beginning I envisaged Flesh as formally more of a traditional novel rather than a series of linked stories [like All That Man Is]. But I did want it to have some of the breadth and variety of experience and setting that linked stories allow for. In some ways it has a lot in common with All That Man Is – they are both a series of narratives about progressively older men, it’s just that in All That Man Is they’re different men, and in Flesh it’s the same man at different ages.’

Why Is The Judging Panel Controversial?

This year’s Booker Prize judging panel is as follows:

• 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle
• Booker Prize-longlisted writer Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
• Writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power
• Booker Prize-longlisted author Kiley Reid
• Actor Sarah Jessica Parker

This final choice has caused some consternation. Why is SJP judging the Booker? Best known for starring in popular TV series Sex and the City and its revival …And Just Like That, Parker’s career stretches all the way back to 1976. Despite her fame, though, many critics consider her an unusual choice for the Booker Prize.

Booker Prize 2025 judges: Christ Power, Sarah Jessica Parker, Roddy Doyle, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ & Kiley Reid. (© Neo Gilder for Booker Prize Foundation)

‘Sarah Jessica Parker is a symptom of a dying genre,’ writes Alexander Larman in The Spectator – and her ‘glitzy, Hollywood, and moneyed existence sits uneasily with the usual cliches of penniless writers shivering at home’. He declared her appointment the death of serious fiction – which is perhaps a slight exaggeration, but it certainly indicates a shift in what ‘literature’ means.

The phenomenon of the celebrity novelist is growing, and celebrity book endorsements are often vital to the success of a book – and the 2025 Booker judging panel is changing to reflect this. Bernadine Evaristo, who won the prize in 2019 with Girl, Woman, Other supported the decision to appoint Parker, thanks to her ability to ‘hopefully draw attention to and even expand the audience for literary fiction’. Parker is also not entirely divorced from the business of books. In June 2023, she launched SJP Lit, her own literary imprint in partnership with the publisher Zando. She’s also an avid reader and uses her Instagram – with almost 10 million followers – to share book recommendations.

The other judges are more traditional choices. Irish novelist and dramatist Roddy Doyle is this year’s chair; an author for more than 40 years, he won the Booker Prize in 1993 with Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. He is joined by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ whose novel A Spell of Good Things was longlisted for the Booker in 2023. Next up is Chris Powers, author of A Lonely Man (longlisted for the Booker in 2020) and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Open Book’; he writes literary criticism for many respected national publications. Lastly, Kiley Reid, also longlisted for the Booker in 2020, has penned two bestselling novels: Such a Fun Age and her Come and Get It.