NEW FUNDING FOR THE LITTLE REBELS AWARD

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The Little Rebels Award for Radical Children’s Fiction has been boosted thanks to £3,500 in new funding from the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust, bringing the award’s prize money up to £2,000.

Co-organiser of the award, Fen Coles of Letterbox Library said, ‘We are so pleased to have the support of the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust. This will make such a difference to the work of the award. Not only will it allow us to widen our reach in providing us with much needed publicity funds, it will, crucially, put the prize money on a more equal footing to other children’s book awards, thereby properly rewarding those authors who are creating exceptional egalitarian, anti-discriminatory and social justice fiction. This will itself mean that we can provide a much bigger platform to progressive children’s fiction that is otherwise all too easily overlooked.’

The Little Rebels Award was initiated by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers and is co-run by Housmans Bookshop and Letterbox Library. The award celebrates children’s books for readers aged 0-12 which promote social justice. Last year’s winner was Freedom (Scholastic 2018) by Catherine Johnson, a historical novel which exposed the UK’s role in the slave trade. The shortlist for the 2020 award will be announced in April with the winning announcement in early July.

The Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust’s general objectives are to ‘advance public education, learning and knowledge in all aspects of the philosophy of Marxism, the history of socialism, and the working class movement’. The Trust helped fund a wide range of initiatives in 2019 including: an interactive, ‘talking’ statue’ of Sylvia Pankhurst; the facilitation of educational talks in secondary schools by Anti-Apartheid Movement Education in Schools; Nice One Cyril!, an anti-racist event and football tournament celebrating the life of footballer Cyrille Regis and the fight against racism.