Children’s Book Prizes: An Evaluation and History of Major Awards for Children’s Books in the English‐Speaking World

Awards for children’s books set out to acknowledge and celebrate quality fact and fiction and illustration. They are also pragmatic devices for promoting and marketing books, opportunities for book people (librarians, teachers, others) to exercise (and sometimes exert!) judgement on what children read and why, and reflections of fashions and preoccupations of an age. All these things combine to make a book like this very useful, particularly when it gets to a paperback stage, and above all for people willing to update it regularly. It’s good for students of children’s literature and publishing, too, identifying who won what and when...