As we await the Nov. 10 news of the winner among the six novels short-listed for the annual Booker Prize, administrators of the prestigious award have made another announcement, a significant one that will be sure to gladden the hearts of dedicated readers who also happen to be the parents (or doting grandparents, perhaps) of young ones.
The Children’s Booker Prize — a 50,000-pound ($66,000) award for the best contemporary fiction for 8-to-12-year-olds written or translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland — will be taking its first nominations in spring, with the shortlist of eight books revealed in November and the inaugural winner announced in February 2027. In addition, up to 30,000 copies of the nominated books will be distributed for free. The goal, according to Booker Prize Foundation Chief Executive Gaby Wood, who calls the project the most ambitious endeavor the organization has launched in the last two decades, is threefold: “It aims to be several things at once: an award that will champion future classics written for children; a social intervention designed to inspire more young people to read; and a seed from which we hope future generations of lifelong readers will grow.”
Chairing the judges panel is prominent British novelist, children’s author and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who wrote the work that became the popular 2004 movie “Millions,” among many, and is renowned for his engaging and relatable child characters. He and two other judges will decide on the shortlist, which will then be subjected to another, key winnowing process: Three child judges will be recruited, with schools and entertainment industry partners identifying them, to join the adults in naming the winner.
High-minded as this outreach appears to be, it occurs to us that the Booker folk might be short-shrifting a laudable goal a bit in aiming for a target crowd that has already reached age 8. The love of reading can be engendered at an even earlier point. Can we hope that a future step might be a new “Booker for the Bambinos”?
Still celebrating: These are heady times for George Saunders, who won the Man Booker Prize for the novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” in 2017 (two years before it became known as the Booker Prize). In September, the National Book Foundation named him the 2025 winner of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a $10,000-plus-bragging-rights award he shares with luminaries such as Toni Morrison and Robert Caro, which he’ll accept at a ceremony and dinner in New York on Nov. 19. Meanwhile, the author of more than a dozen books is also looking forward to the publication of his next novel, “Vigil,” which Random House will release on Jan. 27. On his reader-supported Substack newsletter, The Story Club, Saunders explained that the genesis of the work began when he was mulling over how certain politicos and business types were busily debunking climate change theories back in the 1980s. “I found myself wondering what somebody like that might be feeling now, as the data piles up and the weather gets worse and the rest of the world comes to accept climate change as not only real but urgent. Are they sorry? Still in denial? What would repentance look like, for someone like that? So I set the book on the last night of the life of one such person, the fictional K.J. Boone, the head of a large oil company, and gave him a sort of guardian angel to help him along. The book tells the story of that final night and the various memories, hallucinations, and other-worldly visits experienced by Boone.” (All of which, by the way, remind us of the noncorporeal figures flitting through the pages of the highly entertaining “Lincoln in the Bardo.”)
In the running: Since we have already invoked the approach of the National Book Awards ceremony, we’ll take the opportunity to remind you that the five fiction finalists for 2025 are: Bay Area author Rabih Alameddine for “The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother),” Megha Majumdar’s “A Guardian and a Thief,” Karen Russell’s “Antidote,” Ethan Rutherford’s “North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther” and Bryan Washington’s “Palaver.” In nonfiction, the candidates are: Omar El Akkad for “One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This,” Julia Ioffe for “Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy,” former Oakland resident and Mills College professor Yiyun Li for “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” Claudia Rowe for “Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care” and Jordan Thomas for “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World.” The fiction hopefuls emerged from a field of 434 publisher-nominated authors; nominees for nonfiction from a group of 652. The $10,000 awards also will be bestowed upon winners in poetry, translation and young people’s literature. The nominees will read excerpts from their works at a ticketed event the night before the ceremony hosted by “Crying in H Mart” author Michelle Zauner at New York University Skirball that also will stream at 4 p.m. Nov. 18 (Pacific time) for free. Sign up here.
Hail MacArthur Fellow, well paid: Oakland’s Tommy Orange, the Native American author of 2018’s highly praised “There There” and 2024 follow-up novel “Wandering Stars,” is one of this year’s 22 recipients of an $800,000 MacArthur “genius” grant who will spread that dandy income over the next five years in any way he chooses. Established in 1981 by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, the grants are meant to allow the Fellows recognized for their creativity and potential to pursue their focal interests without financial burdens.
In the pipeline: It has been a good 10 years since Ann Packer published her best-selling novel “The Dive from Clausen’s Pier,” and her new book coming out this month is based on a premise that sounds as full of personal conflict and poignancy as the earlier work. “Some Bright Nowhere” (Harper, 256 pages, $28.99), coming out on Nov. 11, revolves around Eliot and Claire, a married couple in Connecticut who have been together for nearly 40 years. But Claire, battling an illness that has become terminal, asks Eliot to please move out of the house so she can welcome two treasured female friends to come in and care for her in her final hours. Among the accolades already pouring in for the novel are from San Francisco author Andrew Sean Greer, who calls it “a stirring account of the heart,” and this from “The Female Persuasion” author Meg Wolitzer: “Ann Packer writes absorbingly about couples, together and apart, and about love, friendship, and the inevitability of saying goodbye. This is a heartbreaking novel that actually made me happy –– happy to have known these characters and watched them work through the puzzle at the heart of the story, and to have lived with them in their world as long as I did. It’s a wonderful book.”
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on current literary buzz and can’t-miss upcoming book events. Look for it here every last Thursday of the month.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the correct dollar amount the Children’s Booker Prize award.