The shortlist is split into three age groups with three books per group, and was chosen by a panel of judges including a teacher, a librarian, a bookseller, children’s books experts, a Bookbug coordinator and two groups of pupils.
The nine books include four former shortlisted authors, two previous winners, one debut author and one Scottish independent publisher.
The three books in the Bookbug Readers (three-seven years) category are The Paper Dolls by Julia Donaldson and Rebecca Cobb (Macmillan), What’s the Time Mr Wolf? by Debi Gliori (Bloomsbury), and Jumblebum by Chae Strathie and Ben Cort (Scholastic).
Emma Turnbull, development officer at Creative Scotland, said, ‘The superb shortlist this year reflects the brilliant diversity of children's writing in Scotland today.’
Over the next seven months children across Scotland will be reading the shortlisted books in their age category and voting for their favourite one. The winning authors will be announced at an award ceremony on 5 March 2014. Shortlisted authors and illustrators will receive £500 per book, and the three overall winners receive £3,000 each.
Jasmine Fassl, children’s programme manager at the Scottish Book Trust said, ‘The 2013 Scottish Children’s Book Awards are a fantastic representation of the books published by Scottish authors and illustrators for children and young people last year. Funny, exciting and perfectly suited to their audiences, they are closely linked to Scotland – if not set there – and it was a hard task to shortlist only three books in each category. We can’t wait to find out what the young judges themselves think of them.’
The Scottish Book Trust will give a free copy of all of the Bookbug category books to every Primary One (Year One) child during Book Week Scotland (25 November – 1 December 2013). The books will be included in the Bookbug Primary One Family Pack, funded by the Scottish government and Education Scotland. The pack will also serve as a link between schools, homes and libraries and will help encourage reading in children.
The Scottish Children’s Book Awards are Scotland’s largest book awards and this is the seventh year that the Scottish Book Trust will be running them. Voting numbers have increased year on year with nearly 32,000 children voting in 2012.
CALL Scotland has worked with the Scottish Book Trust and the authors and publishers to create digital versions of the nine shortlisted books for children and young people with physical, visual and reading difficulties who can’t read paper books. The digital books are available free of charge from www.callscotland.org.uk/Home/
The Scottish Children’s Book Awards also encourages budding authors or journalists to submit book reviews to the Book Review Competition. This offers children the chance to win book tokens for themselves and an author visit for their school.
The Scottish Children’s Book Awards are managed by the Scottish Book Trust in partnership with Creative Scotland, and are supported by the Barcapel Foundation, Ernest Cook Trust, Waterstones, the Zachs-Adam family and CALL Scotland.
