James Reckitt Hull Children’s Book Award 2025

The Awards, now in their 18th year, are aimed at fostering a love of reading from an early age by introducing young people to new writers and titles they might not normally pick up.

Over the course of 2024, newly published titles, suitable for children and young people have been read by Hull Libraries’ staff and an army of volunteers, who reviewed and scored each title. This information was then used to draw up the longlist.

Separated into three age categories, the longlists are as follows:

EYFS/KS1 Picture Book Award Longlist:

• Clive Penguin - Hew Lewis Jones / Ben Sanders (Little Tiger)
• Everybody Toots! - Jonny Leighton / Mike Byrne (Buster Books)
• Heavy Metal Badger - Duncan Beedie (Little Tiger)
• One Goose Two Moose - Kael Tudor / Nicola Slater (Scholastic)
• Otto the Top Dog - Catherine Rayner (Macmillan)
• The Dress in the Window - Robert Tregoning / Pippa Curnick (Oxford University Press)
• The Party Animals! - Alex Willmore (Tate)
• Troll - Frances Stickley / Stefano Martinuz (Magic Cat)
• Who Ate Steve? - Susannah Lloyd / Kate Hindley (Nosy Crow)
• Zebracadabra! - Kes Gray / Fred Blunt (Hodder)

The KS2 Longlist:

• Ice Cream Boy - Lindsay Littleson (Kelpies)
• The Secret of Golden Island - Natasha Farrant (Faber and Faber)
• Shipwrecked - Jenny Pearson (Usbourne)
• The Boy who Fell from the Sky - Benjamin Dean (Simon and Schuster)
• Cheat Book Vol. 1 - Ramzee (Hachette)
• The Clockwork Conspiracy - Sam Sedgman (Bloomsbury)
• The Glorious Race of Magical Beasts - Alex Bell (Faber and Faber)
• The Letter with the Golden Stamp - Onjali Q Rauf (Orion)
• The Wanderdays - Clare Povey (Usbourne)
• Toxic - Mitch Johnson (Hachette)

The KS3 Longlist:

• Artezans - L.D Lapinski (Hachette)
• Bird Boy - Catherine Bruton (Nosy Crow)
• City of Horses - Frances Moloney (Pushkin Press)
• I am Wolf - Alastair Chisholm (Nosy Crow)
• North and the Only One - Vashti Hardy (Scholastic)
• Starminster - Megan Hopkins (Harper Collins)
• The Double Life of Ted Amos - Simon James Green (Scholastic)
• The Hidden Story of Estie Noor - Nadine Aisha Jassat (Orion)
• The Wrong Shoes - Tom Percival (Simon and Schuster)
• Tidemagic: The Many Faces of Ista Flit - Clare Harlow (Puffin)

The shortlist will be announced on Monday 6 January 2025.

Copies of the shortlisted titles are donated to all schools subscribing to the Hull Schools Library Service and the authors are invited to the city to work with the young people.

It will then be up to the pupils to vote for their favourite story. The Picture Book Award will take place during National Storytelling Week in February 2025.

The KS2 and KS3 award ceremonies will take place at The Big Malarkey Festival in June 2025 when children hear from the writers, share their opinions of the books and vote for their winning title. The votes are collated on the day and a specially commissioned trophy is presented to the winning writer.

All of the shortlisted books will be available to borrow for free at Hull’s libraries.

For further information contact [email protected]