BookTrust

Last updated

BookTrust
Formation1921;102 years ago (1921)
Legal statusIndependent charity
PurposeBookTrust is the UK's largest children's reading charity, dedicated to getting children reading.
HeadquartersLeeds, England
Location
  • Leeds, London, Cardiff and Belfast
Chief Executive
Diana Gerald
Website booktrust.org.uk

BookTrust is a UK children's reading charity dedicated to getting children reading. [1]

Contents

The charity works across England, Wales and Northern Ireland – its head office is in Leeds, England.

BookTrust was founded in 1921 by Hugh Walpole, Stanley Unwin, Maurice Marston and Harold Macmillan.

The Queen is BookTrust's patron. In 2011, she took over the role from the Duke of Edinburgh who stood down after a number of years. [2] BookTrust's president is Sir Michael Morpurgo, the award-winning author of over 120 books for children, including War Horse . [3] The charity's chief executive is Diana Gerald, who took over from Viv Bird in early 2015. [4]

History

In 1921, BookTrust (formerly the Society of Bookmen) was founded by authors Hugh Walpole and John Galsworthy, publishers Stanley Unwin and Maurice Marston and politician Harold Macmillan.

At one of the society's early meetings in 1924, it was proposed that a National Book Council should be formed; the first meeting of the newly formed National Book Council took place in Eastbourne on 11 September 1924.

In 1969, BookTrust's then Chief Executive, Martyn Goff, secured funding from the Arts Council. This allowed the charity to move in new directions. Ultimately this paved the way for BookTrust to manage several established literary prizes, including the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly The Orange Prize for Fiction) and the Sunday Times Short Story Award. The charity now focuses on books for children and one of its current prizes is the Blue Peter Book Awards.

In a bid to demonstrate and champion the benefits of reading from a young age, Bookstart was created in 1992 by the charity in partnership with libraries and health visitors.

Bookstart

Bookstart is BookTrust's early years programme. Every child in England and Wales gets a free Bookstart pack before they are 12 months old and again aged 3–4 years (27 months in Wales). There are also black-and-white booklets for newborns and dual language books. [5]

The pilot for the programme was initiated in Birmingham in 1992 and involved 300 babies. BookTrust commissioned Professor Barry Wade and Dr Maggie Moore to both promote and research the Bookstart project. The project built on previous research which identified the significance of reading with very young children. [6]

The research found that Bookstart children began school with significant advantages and with higher attainment in all aspects of the nine pre-school baseline assessments. By 1999, many local authorities were eager to participate in the Bookstart programme and by March 2000, 92% of local authorities had joined the programme. The success of the Bookstart programmes was helped by library staff willing to become "Bookstart Coordinators".

Bookstart offers book packs for children with additional needs, [7] these include:

Bookgifting programmes

As well as Bookstart, BookTrust also runs the following programmes and campaigns that give out books, resources and support to children:

Prizes

Projects and campaigns

Other

On Friday 17 December 2010 it was announced that the government would cut its entire £13 million annual grant to BookTrust's English bookgifting schemes. The schemes, including Bookstart, Booktime and Booked Up, provided more than two million packs of books to English children annually. After a public campaign by authors including Philip Pullman and Andrew Motion, the government announced it would negotiate with BookTrust on renewal of the funding. BookTrust continues to be supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Related Research Articles

Anne Fine OBE FRSL is an English writer. Although best known for children's books, she also writes for adults. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and she was appointed an OBE in 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quentin Blake</span> British cartoonist, illustrator and childrens writer

Sir Quentin Saxby Blake, is an English cartoonist, caricaturist, illustrator and children's writer. He has illustrated over 300 books, including 18 written by Roald Dahl, which are among his most popular works. For his lasting contribution as a children's illustrator he won the biennial international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2002, the highest recognition available to creators of children's books. From 1999 to 2001, he was the inaugural British Children's Laureate. He is a patron of the Association of Illustrators.

The Nestlé Children's Book Prize, and Nestlé Smarties Book Prize for a time, was a set of annual awards for British children's books that ran from 1985 to 2007. It was administered by BookTrust, an independent charity that promotes books and reading in the United Kingdom, and sponsored by Nestlé, the manufacturer of Smarties candy. It was one of the most respected and prestigious prizes for children's literature.

Children's Laureate, now known as the Waterstones Children's Laureate, is a prestigious position awarded in the United Kingdom once every two years to a "writer or illustrator of children's books to celebrate outstanding achievement in their field." The role promotes the importance of children’s literature, reading, creativity and storytelling while promoting the right of every child to enjoy a lifetime of books and stories. Each Laureate uses their tenure to focus on an aspect of children’s books – these have included poetry, storytelling, readers with disabilities and illustration. 

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julia Donaldson</span> English writer and playwright (born 1948)

Julia Catherine Donaldson is an English writer and playwright, and the 2011–2013 Children's Laureate. She is best known for her popular rhyming stories for children, especially those illustrated by Axel Scheffler, which include The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and Stick Man. She originally wrote songs for children's television but has concentrated on writing books since the words of one of her songs, "A Squash and a Squeeze", were made into a children's book in 1993. Of her 184 published works, 64 are widely available in bookshops. The remaining 120 are intended for school use and include her Songbirds phonic reading scheme, which is part of the Oxford University Press's Oxford Reading Tree.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Morpurgo</span> British childrens writer (born 1943)

Sir Michael Andrew Bridge Morpurgo is an English book author, poet, playwright, and librettist who is known best for children's novels such as War Horse (1982). His work is noted for its "magical storytelling", for recurring themes such as the triumph of an outsider or survival, for characters' relationships with nature, and for vivid settings such as the Cornish coast or World War I. Morpurgo became the third Children's Laureate, from 2003 to 2005, and he is also the current President of BookTrust, the UK's largest children's reading charity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Riddell</span> Illustrator

Chris Riddell is a South African-born English illustrator and occasional writer of children's books and a political cartoonist for the Observer. He has won three Kate Greenaway Medals - the British librarians' annual award for the best-illustrated children's book, and two of his works were commended runners-up, a distinction dropped after 2002.

Debi Gliori is a Scottish writer and illustrator of children's books.

The Blue Peter Book Awards were a set of literary awards for children's books conferred by the BBC television programme Blue Peter. They were inaugurated in 2000 for books published in 1999 and 2000. The awards were managed by reading charity, BookTrust, from 2006 until the final award in 2022. From 2013 until the final award, there were two award categories: Best Story and Best Book with Facts.

The Booktrust Early Years Awards, originally the Sainsbury’s Baby Book Award(s), was a set of annual literary prizes for children's picture books. It was administered by Booktrust, an independent charity that promotes books and reading; from 1999 to 2004. The Booktrust Early Years Awards was sponsored by the supermarket chain Sainsbury's with its last award give in 2010.

The Eleanor Farjeon Award is made for distinguished service to the world of British children's books and is given to someone whose commitment and contribution is deemed to be outstanding. Founded in 1966, it is presented annually in memory of the celebrated author Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965). The spirit of the award is to recognise the unsung heroes who contribute so much to every aspect of children's books. The award is administered by the Children's Book Circle and sponsored by the Eleanor Farjeon Trust.

Emily Gravett is an English author and illustrator of children's picture books. For her debut book Wolves published in 2005 and Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears published three years later, she won the annual Kate Greenaway Medal recognising the year's best-illustrated British children's book.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cressida Cowell</span> British writer

Cressida Cowell FRSL is a British children's author, popularly known for the book series, How to Train Your Dragon, which has subsequently become an award-winning franchise as adapted for the screen by DreamWorks Animation. As of 2015, the series has sold more than seven million copies around the world.

Scottish Book Trust is a national charity based in Edinburgh, Scotland promoting literature, reading and writing in Scotland. Scottish Book Trust works with and for a range of audiences, including babies and parents, children and young people, teachers and learning professionals, and writers and publishers.

Nosy Crow is an independent children's publisher, based in London. The company was founded in 2010 by Kate Wilson, formerly MD of Macmillan Children’s Books and Group MD of Scholastic UK Ltd, Adrian Soar, formerly Book Publishing CEO of Macmillan Publishers, and Camilla Reid, formerly Editorial Director of Campbell Books. In 2020, the company was named Independent Publisher of the Year at the British Book Awards. As of 2021, Nosy Crow is the UK's 11th largest children's publisher, according to Nielsen BookScan data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Liz Pichon</span> British author and illustrator of childrens books

Liz Pichon is a British author and illustrator of children's books. She is best known for her Tom Gates series of "satirical realist comedy fiction", which has been translated into 46 languages and sold more than fourteen million copies worldwide.

Jim Field is a British illustrator from London, who now lives in Paris with his wife and daughter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Coelho</span> British poet and childrens book author

Joseph Coelho FRSL is a British poet and children's book author who was elected Children's Laureate in 2022. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rob Biddulph</span> British childrens author, illustrator (born 1972)

Rob Biddulph is a British children's author and illustrator.

References

  1. ↑ BookTrust, "About us". Retrieved 26 November 2019.
  2. ↑ "Our Patron | BookTrust". www.booktrust.org.uk. Retrieved 15 November 2022.
  3. ↑ "Our President | BookTrust". www.booktrust.org.uk. Retrieved 15 November 2022.
  4. ↑ "Our Leadership Team | BookTrust". www.booktrust.org.uk. Retrieved 15 November 2022.
  5. ↑ Bookstart, "Bookstart for families". Retrieved 26 November 2019.
  6. ↑ Bookstart, "History of Bookstart". Retrieved 8 August 2018.
  7. ↑ Bookstart, "Packs for children with additional needs". Retrieved 8 August 2018.
  8. ↑ Primary Times, "BookTrust gifts every reception aged child in England with picture book The Bumblebear", May 2017. Retrieved 10 August 2018.
  9. ↑ School Library Association, "BookTrust announces new books for Bookbuzz 2018 programme". Retrieved 10 August 2018.
  10. ↑ Association of School and College Leaders, "Free books for your school library". Retrieved 10 August 2018.
  11. ↑ "Everything you need to know about the Waterstones Children's Laureate". www.booktrust.org.uk.
  12. ↑ BBC, "Children's Laureate: Who is Cressida Cowell?", 9 July 2019. Retrieved 26 November 2019.
  13. ↑ Flood, Alison (9 May 2019). "Jan Pieńkowski: inside the mind behind Meg and Mog – picture essay". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 November 2019.
  14. ↑ Drabble, Emily (9 November 2021). "'We are all creatures of language': Lifetime Achievement Award winner John Agard on his incredible life and career". BookTrust. Retrieved 9 November 2021.
  15. ↑ Flood, Alison (9 November 2021). "John Agard becomes first poet to win BookTrust lifetime achievement award". The Guardian .
  16. ↑ Chandler, Mark (29 August 2019). "Averiss and Beardshaw win Book of the Year at Sainsbury's Children's Book Awards". The Bookseller. Retrieved 26 November 2019.
  17. ↑ Wood, Heloise (21 November 2019). "Emily Gravett's squirrel tale scoops the inaugural BookTrust Storytime Prize". The Bookseller. Retrieved 26 November 2019.
  18. ↑ "Research into representation of people of colour among children's book authors and illustrators". www.booktrust.org.uk. Retrieved 15 November 2022.
  19. ↑ BookTrust, "BookTrust Represents". Retrieved 26 November 2019
  20. ↑ "Thank you to everyone who took part in Pyjamarama 2022!". www.booktrust.org.uk. Retrieved 15 November 2022.
  21. ↑ BookTrust, "Jump into your PJs with BookTrust". Retrieved 26 November 2019
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.