In October of 2025, with much fanfare, the Booker Prize Foundation announced a “Children’s Booker Prize” to recognize “the best contemporary fiction for children aged eight to twelve” (quoted from the website: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-childrens-booker-prize). This news sent a ripple through the children’s book world – the “Children’s Booker Prize” with its significant prize purse of GBP 50,000 and its prestigious brand name will certainly catapult the selections to bestselling status and the authors to unprecedented fame. The new prize joins a host of other existing children’s book prizes such as the US-focused Newbery Award and Caldecott Medal in shaping how books enter the market. As scholars such as James F. English have argued, literary prizes influence nearly all gatekeepers, that is, publishers, reviewers, librarians – and teachers, who curate and select books for their classroom syllabi and libraries. Research shows that prizes contribute measurably to canonization processes. Taking established and less-established children’s literary prizes and the logics of literary prize culture as our points of departure, this course will explore the contemporary field of children’s literature, and teach future gatekeepers to critically question discourses of prizeworthiness vis-à-vis children’s books.

Kurs im HIS-LSF