Recommended children's booklists sorted by age or topic

Age Group: KS3 (Ages 11-14)

Waterstones Children’s Book Prize

Established in 2005, the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize recognises emerging talent in children’s literature across three categories: Illustrated Books, Younger Readers and Older Readers.

This year’s shortlist includes several BooksForTopics favourites, including Huw Aaron’s Unfairies, recommended in our Christmas Gift Guide, Ashley Thorpe’s Spirit Warriors, which featured in our Book Friday Recommendations, and former Book of the Month My Rice is Best, by Selina Brown.

Congratulations to the winners of the 2026 awards: Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob (Illustrated and Overall Winner), Evie and Maryam’s Family Tree (Younger Readers) and A Language of Dragons (Older Readers).

For more information about the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize click here, or check out the full shortlist below!

Excelsior Award

The Excelsior Awards recognise great graphic novels and manga, with the winners being decided based on children’s ratings of each book.

The 2026 shortlists for the White (KS2), Blue (KS3) and Red (KS4) awards feature an impressive range of characters and worlds, some already well-known such as Minecraft: The Manga, Star Wars: Jango Fett – Trail of Lost Hope and Stranger Things & Dungeons and Dragons: The Rise of Hellfire. Two titles from our 2025 Gift Guide are also shortlisted: Unfairies (White award) and When the Sky Falls (Blue award).

The 2026 Excelsior Award winners are:

White Award (KS2): Almost Sunset
Blue Award (KS3): DC x Sonic the Hedgehog
Red Award (KS4): The Uncanny X-Men: Red Wave
Overall Winner: DC x Sonic the Hedgehog

For more information about the Excelsior Award click here, or check out the full shortlist below!

Nero Book Awards Children’s Fiction Award

Back for its third year, the Nero Children’s Fiction Award celebrates outstanding writing for children by great authors living in the UK and Ireland.

This year’s shortlist includes four powerfully written chapter books. There’s gripping mystery in People Like Stars and electrifying fantasy in Dragonborn, while Shrapnel Boys and the winning title, My Soul, a Shining Tree, are historial fiction set in the first and second world wars.

For more information about the Nero Book Awards click here, or check out the full shortlist below!

Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize

Awarded by The Royal Society, the Young People’s Book Prize recognises excellent, accessible STEM books for under 14s.

Some brilliant non-fiction picks appear in this year’s shortlist, including The Animal Body Book, which is one of our top choices for the KS2 Animals Topic, and our former Book of the Month pick, The History of Information. The winning title this year was The Wild Life of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals, by Mike Barfield and illustrator Paula Bossio.

For more information about the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize click here, or check out the full shortlist below!

Little Rebels Children’s Book Award

Awarded by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers, the Little Rebels Children’s Book Award recognises radical fiction published in the UK and aimed at children aged 0-12.

The impressive shortlist for this year’s award features titles that appear throughout our booklists, including Mayowa and the Sea of Words which is on our 2025 Summer Reads list, and Keedie, which is among our 50 Recommended Reads for Year 6. This year’s winning title is The Fights that Make Us by Sarah Hagger-Holt.

For more information about the Little Rebels Children’s Book Award click here, or check out the full 2025 shortlist below!

Jhalak Children’s and YA Prize

Awarded annually since 2020, the Jhalak Children’s and YA Prize celebrates books by writers of colour in the UK and Ireland.

This year’s shortlist showcases six impressive books for children and young adults. Among these are BooksForTopics favourites Supa Nova and the winning title My Name is Samim, both of which have previously featured in our Books of the Month, as well has being recommended in our National Year of Reading booklist.

For more information about the Jhalak Children’s and YA Prize click here, or check out the full shortlist below!

YA Book Prize

The YA Book Prize launched in 2014 to celebrate great fiction for teenagers and young adults. The prize aims to get more teens reading and the ten books featured in this year’s shortlist are sure to lure lapsed readers back in! From the reimagined Greek mythology of Bea Fitzgerald’s A Beautiful Evil, to Harry Trevaldwyn’s hilarious, contemporary rom-com The Romantic Tragedies of a Drama King, to Ravena Guron’s deadly thriller Mondays are Murder, and the winning title, Josh Silver’s gripping Traumaland, there is huge variety in this impressive list.

For more information about the YA Book Prize click here, or check out the full shortlist below!

Young Quills Award for Historical Fiction

Run annually by The Historical Association, Young Quills celebrates historical fiction for children and young adults. Longlisted titles are sent to selected schools where children and young people review the books, with these reviews forming the basis of the shortlisting process.

This year’s shortlist is full of BooksForTopics favourites, including several titles that have featured in our Recommended Reads and our National Year of Reading Booklist, such as Christina Balit’s The Boy Who Became Queen (5-8 Years), Jenny Pearson’s Shrapnel Boys (8-11 Years), Dance of Resistance (8-11 Years) and Under a Fire-Red Sky (11-13 Years).

For more information about the Young Quills Award click here, or check out the full shortlist below!

Here to Slay

Radhika Sanghani

Chapter book

Kali has a lot to deal with. Her crush doesn’t notice her, her parents love her cousin more, and a big family wedding is overshadowing her 16th birthday. So, she really did NOT need a demon appearing in her bedroom and for the fate of the world to rest in her hands.

It turns out that all girls named after the Indian demon-fighting goddess Kali are imbued with special powers, and are destined to fight demons. At least she’s not alone in this mess – she’s got the very cool, very confident K to teach her how to be a demon slayer. Now, if only she could also figure out how to slay at life…

How to Survive a Horror Movie

Scarlett Dunmore

Chapter book

Horror movie enthusiast Charley is determined to keep a low profile when she’s enrolled at a girls’ boarding school on a remote island. That is, until someone starts killing off her senior class! From elaborate scare tactics to severed heads in fridges, Charley has found herself at the centre of a teen horror movie. And that’s not the only alarming thing that’s happening – she’s now seeing the ghosts of her former classmates!?

Haunted by her peers, and with everyone beginning to suspect her, Charley decides to do something about it. She and her only best friend Olive are going to solve the murders and find out who’s killing off the class before graduation. Charley just needs those pesky ghosts to shut up and give her a hand.

A fast-paced tongue-in-cheek YA novel about two friends trying to survive senior year – literally! Perfect for fans of Fear Street, The Midnight Club and the SCREAM franchise.