Winners of the 2025 Week Junior Book Awards announced!
Monday 29th September, 2025
Week Junior Book Award Celebrates Winners
This week, The Week Junior celebrated the brilliant world of children’s books. Winners of The Week Junior Book Awards have been announced at a ceremony held at London’s County Hall. Hosted by Bex Lindsay, children’s books by established and emerging authors and illustrators were crowned across 14 categories, including audiobook, cover of the year, breakthrough book and more. Followers of our Children’s Book Award Calendar may have been eagerly anticipating the announcement.
Among the winners were Tom Percival, Mariesa Dulak, Kieran Larwood and Greg Jenner, and a number of the winning books will be familiar to the BooksForTopics community from their appearances on our primary school booklists.
Inspiring, Informative and Original Children’s Books
Established in 2023, The Week Junior Book Awards were created to address the need for critical discourse around children’s literature and to spotlight the remarkable work of both emerging and established children’s authors. In light of the ongoing decline in children’s reading enjoyment and ahead of a National Year of Reading, this year’s awards are well timed to give inspiring children’s books a wider platform. You can read about the full Week Junior Book Award shortlists here.
Anna Bassi, Editorial Director of The Week Junior and chair of the awards, said:
“Inspiring, informative and entirely original, our fourteen award winners represent the very best in children’s literature. These extraordinary books showcase the breadth and depth of what’s possible, exploring important real-life issues, explaining complex topics, making learning fun and taking young readers on unforgettable adventures. Congratulations to all the authors, illustrators, editors, designers and publishers who have brought them into being and on to bookshelves!.”
New and Familiar Favourites
The Week Junior’s readers voted for the winners of the Children’s Choice and Cover of the Year Awards categories. With thousands of votes cast, the awards for best Cover and Children’s Choice were decided by readers of The Week Junior, hailing Guinness World Records 2025 and Happy Days: 365 Facts to Brighten Every Day of the Year as the most voted for in each category.
Many of our favourite titles and authors appeared in this year’s incredibly varied shortlist, with titles from our 2025 Year Group Recommended Reads and Books of the Month featuring in most of the award categories, including The Boy to Beat the Gods (Breakthrough), There is a Season (Animals and Nature), Turtle Moon (Older Fiction), Betty Steady (Younger Fiction), Blitz (Graphic Novel), Blue Monster (Picture Book), Out of this World (Poetry) and Scientists in the Wild: Antarctica (STEM).
The Winners of The Week Junior Book Awards 2024
Here are the winners of the 2025 Week Junior Book Awards:
Children’s Book of the Year: Breakthrough – Tidemagic: The Many Faces of Ista Flit by Clare Harlow & Karl James Mountford (Penguin Random House)
Children’s Book of the Year: Graphic Novel – Unicorn Boy by Dave Roman (Hachette Children’s Group)
HIGHLY COMMENDED – Blitz One Family’s War by Martin Impey (publisher Harbour Moon Publishing)
Children’s Book of the Year: Younger fiction – Dungeon Runners: Hero Trial by Kieran Larwood & Joe Todd-Stanton (Nosy Crow)
HIGHLY COMMENDED – Watts & Whiskerton: Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure by Meg McLaren (publisher Piccadilly Press)
Children’s Book of the Year: Older fiction – The Wrong Shoes by Tom Percival (Simon & Schuster Children’s Books)
Children’s Book of the Year: Hobbies and Interests – This Book Will Make You an Artist by Ruth Millington & Ellen Surrey (Nosy Crow)
Children’s Book of the Year: Factual – Explodapedia: Rewild by Ben Martynoga & Moose Allain (David Fickling Books)
Children’s Book of the Year: STEM – Big Bad Wolf Investigates: Fairy Tales by Catherine Cawthorne & Sara Ogilvie (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Children’s Book of the Year: Animals and Nature – Beasts from the Deep by Matt Ralphs & Kaley McKean (Nosy Crow)
Children’s Book of the Year: Picture Book – There’s a Tiger on the Train by Mariesa Dulak & Rebecca Cobb (Faber)
Children’s Book of the Year: Audiobook – Totally Chaotic History: Roman Britain Gets Rowdy by Dr Emma Southon and Greg Jenner (W.F. Howes)
HIGHLY COMMENDED – Grimwood: Party Animals! by Nadia Shireen (publisher Simon & Schuster Children’s Books)
Children’s Book of the Year: Poetry – Fia and the Last Snow Deer by Eilish Fisher & Dermot Flynn; publisher (Penguin Random House)
Children’s Book of the Year: Wellbeing – Every Body by Molly Forbes & Mollie Cronin (Penguin Random House)
Children’s Book Cover of the Year – Guinness World Records 2025 by Craig Glenday & Chris Labrooy (World Records Limited_
Children’s Choice – Happy Days: 365 Facts to Brighten Every Day of the Year by Emily Coxhead (Walker Books)
Congratulations from the BooksForTopics team to all winning authors, illustrators and publishers.
You can see the full Week Junior Book Award shortlist here.
Further information can be found on The Week Junior Book Awards website.
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Follow Children’s Book Awards all year round with our downloadable Children’s Book Award Calendar and online shortlists, updated monthly.
Where next?
> Visit our Reading for Pleasure Hub.
> Browse our Topic Booklists.
> See our Books of the Month.
> View our Year Group booklists