Awards and prizes
From our Lifetime Achievement Award, to honouring the books young people love, to finding the best international children's fiction, our prizes and awards celebrate writing from the UK and beyond.
Our awards and prizes promote titles to a wide audience, bringing new releases to the public's attention and getting readers to engage with different types of books.
They also support writers and illustrators, rewarding them for their endeavours, and celebrate children's books and writers as an important part of the UK's arts and culture landscape.
Below, you can discover the current range of prizes we are involved with.
Current prizes
BookTrust Storytime Prize
This prize celebrates and promotes the best books for sharing with young children. We are looking for books which have wide appeal to parents and carers across our diverse nation, and for stories which can be read and enjoyed over and over again.
Lifetime Achievement Award
The BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award is given to a children's writer or illustrator whose body of work merits recognition for a lifetime's achievement in children's literature.
Children's Laureate
Poet and author Joseph Coelho is the Waterstones Children's Laureate for 2022-24: a role that is normally awarded once every two years to an eminent writer or illustrator of children's books to celebrate their outstanding achievement.
Prizes archive
Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction
The Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction was set up to celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women throughout the world.
BBC National Short Story Award
The BBC National Short Story Award is one of the most prestigious for a single short story, with the winning author receiving £15,000.
BBC Young Writers Award
The BBC Young Writers Award launched in 2014 as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of the BBC National Short Story Award with BookTrust.
Blue Peter Book Awards
The Blue Peter Book Awards celebrated the best authors, most creative illustrators and the greatest reads for children.
BookTrust Best Book Awards
The Book Trust Best Book Awards with Amazon Kindle, which took place in 2014, sought to unearth the very best children’s books the UK has to offer.
BookTrust Best New Illustrators Award
The Booktrust Best New Illustrators Award, held in 2008 and 2011, celebrated the best rising talent in the field of children’s illustration.
In Other Words
In Other Words is a prize to promote the translation and UK publication of outstanding children's literature from around the world.
Roald Dahl Funny Prize
The Roald Dahl Funny Prize ran from 2008 to 2013 and aimed to promote laughter and humour as a feel-good factor when reading.
The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award
The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award is open to any novelist or short story writer from around the world who is published in the UK.
BookTrust has been involved with a number of prizes over the years, including the David Cohen Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Kim Scott Walwyn Prize, the BookTrust Early Years Awards, the BookTrust Teenage Prize, the Nestlé Children's Book Prize, New Writing Ventures, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Orange Award for New Writers, the Power of Reading Award and the YoungMinds Award.
For information about any of these prizes, please email [email protected].