Ever since The Booktrust Teenage Prize folded in 2010 there has been no national award for YA titles published in the UK.
This has been bugging me for a while, and today on twitter I discovered that has been niggling away at others as well.
A while ago I had an idea to run a Teen Book Award through Teen Librarian but shelved it with other thoughts I have that require time and money.
The idea is to run an award where the books are nominated by librarians and then voted on by the readers themselves.
There is a wealth of YA authorial talent in the UK and it should be recognized; the only other national award that comes close is the CILIP Carnegie Award and that is aimed at books for children and teens.
At the moment it is only the germ of an idea so please leave comments in the comment field below with suggestions on partnership, sponsorship and anything that can carry this idea to fruition.
I am certainly in favour of an award specifically for YA fiction, as they have in the States in the Printz award. I am not so sure about having it voted for by the young people themselves, or at any rate just be them. Would it be possible to have a shared voing system, so that the librarians’ judgement is weighted equally with the young people’s. This would ensure that literary quality was fully valued alongside popularity. On eproblem wth the young people’s vote is having enough of them who have read all the shortlist to make it meaningful. I know that while I can get students to read some of the books, I rarely have many who have the time to read all of them, which means they are voting with inadequate information. One way of making this less of a problem would be to give a longer reading time than has ever been possible with the Carnegie. It is also important to make sure schools can get involved by not having the reading time mainly over the summer, as happens with the Guardian. Use the summer, I think that could be good, but make sure there is a good chunk of time in the autumn for discussion.
I agree with you, I think it is time we had a new national award, but I also agree with Elizabeth, we need time for the pupils to read them – Carnegie is too short in its time frames. Happy to offer help/support if we want to get this started!
Sara