MacSweeney and Haworth-Booth among judges for this year's Little Rebels Award

Gay’s the Word bookshop manager Jim MacSweeney and author illustrator Emily Haworth-Booth are among the judges for this year’s Little Rebels Award for Radical Children’s Fiction.  

Submissions for the £2,000 award, which celebrates UK children’s books for readers aged 0-12 which promote social justice, are now open. MacSweeney and Haworth-Book will be joined on the judging panel by reading development and children’s book consultant Jake Hope and research and development director at the Centre for Literature in Primary Education (CLPE) Farrah Serroukh. A fifth judge will be confirmed at a later date. 

Last year’s prize went to Sarah Hagger-Holt for Proud of Me (Usborne Books), a coming-of-age novel which threads through themes of cross-generational responses to LGBTQ+ identities, religious-based homophobia and the legacy of Section 28. Previous winners include Zanib Mian, A M Dassu and Catherine Johnson. 

The prize administrators said: “This year has really seen the Little Rebels Award up its game. It was wonderful to be able to return to an in-person award night back in July, even if an inconvenient heatwave prompted a dramatic overnight timetable shuffle! And, thanks to the additional funding provided to us by the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust, we were able to produce lots of additional materials, including reading guides, to support schools and libraries in drawing out the key social justice issues in each of the shortlisted texts. Our aim to bring radical, political, social justice-minded, thought-provoking fiction into classrooms and into the hands of the youngest readers has really gathered apace”. 

The prize is administered by booksellers Letterbox Library and Housmans Bookshop on behalf of the Alliance of Radical Booksellers. The winner’s prize includes £2,000 funded by the The Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust. 

Publishers are invited to submit relevant books first published in 2022. Full submission guidelines can be found at www.littlerebels.org. The closing date for nominations is 19th January 2023. The shortlist will be announced in April 2023 with the winning announcement in early July.