Judged entirely by teachers, the UKLA Book Awards are a celebration of children’s books which seeks to encourage teachers to increase their knowledge of newly published, high quality children’s books, and to promote the place of books in educational settings at all levels.
A total of 87 teachers were involved in shortlisting for the 2023 awards, and here at BooksForTopics HQ, we were delighted to see so many of our favourite titles and authors featured among the shortlists for these awards.
The Age 3-6 list features Who Are You? and The Comet, which both appear on our Recommended Reads lists, and we were excited to see Malorie Blackman – whose titles more usually feature in our lists for older children – represented in this list too, with We’re Going to Find the Monster! The winner of the Age 3-6 category, Flooded, was previously one of our Books of the Month picks, along with The Lion Above the Door and The Chime Seekers which both appear in the Age 7-10 shortlist. The Light in Everything was the winner in the Age 7-10 category.
More of our Recommended Reads and Books of the Month picks are to be found in the Information Books shortlist, including Amazon River, Bandoola: The Great Elephant Rescue and I am the Subway.
12 of the shortlisting panel went on to form the final judging panel, and the winners were announced on 23rd June at the UKLA International Conference at the University of Exeter.
Although the UKLA Book Awards celebrate books for children from nursery up to KS4, here we focus on the titles suited to readers of primary school age. The full shortlists, including the titles for older readers, can be found here.
