Are you a publisher on the look out for great books for children and young adults from across the globe? Are you excited about publishing fantastic stories in English translation? Then look no further! This week, World Kid Lit celebrates London Book Fair by bringing you a few suggestions we think readers (of all ages) will love! Today we travel to Belgium, Bulgaria, the Faroe Islands, Spain, Sweden and Ukraine. And the great news for publishers is that translation funding opportunities are available for all languages! Belgium Morris Written by: Bart Moeyaert Illustrated by: Se ..read more

Are you a publisher on the look out for great books for children and young adults from across the globe? Are you excited about publishing fantastic stories in English translation? Then look no further! This week, World Kid Lit celebrates London Book Fair by bringing you a few suggestions we think readers (of all ages) will love! Today we travel to the Americas, North and South, with tips from Canada, Curaçao & Bolivia. Canada Ratatin Written by: Mélina Schoenborn  Illustrated by: Felipe Arriagada-Nunez  Original language: French [Canada] Target Age: 3+  Pub ..read more

by Paula Holmes One month ago, January 22, the 2024 Youth Media Award (YMAs) announcements took place during the American Library Association’s LibLearnX conference in Baltimore, Maryland.  For those interested in translations, one waits for the Mildred L. Batchelder Award, “for a children’s book considered to be the most outstanding of those books originally published in a foreign language in a foreign country, and subsequently translated into English and published in the United States.”   The 2024 YMA’s added a bit of extra translation excitement as the Stonewall and Printz Awards ..read more

Today we’re excited to post an interview between Japanese translators Deborah Iwabuchi and Avery Fischer Udagawa, whose latest translation The House of the Lost on the Cape just won the 2024 Batchelder Honor. Many thanks to SCBWI Japan Translation Group for graciously allowing us to repost. By Deborah Iwabuchi Avery Fischer Udagawa, translator of the 2022 Mildred L. Batchelder Award-winning Temple Alley Summer by Sachiko Kashiwaba, has translated a second book by the same author (Ed. note: it just won the 2024 award!) The House of the Lost on the Cape (岬のマヨイガ) is set i ..read more

Today World Kid Lit Co-Editor Johanna McCalmont talks to translator Ann Marie Boulanger about how she brought Stéphanie Lapointe’s Franny Cloutier:The Year My Life Turned Upside Down to readers in English. Johanna WKL: Thanks for joining us on the blog today. The Year My Life Turned Upside Down is such a fascinating book in so many colourful ways – literally! I can’t wait to find out more about how you translated the book from French into English but perhaps we can start by getting to know you first. How did you come to learn French? What made you want to become a translator? Ann Marie Boulan ..read more

This week World Kid Lit regular contributor Nanette McGuinness interviews Shelley Fairweather-Vega about her work translating from Russian the new Kazakh middle grade novel Batu and the Search for the Golden Cup… Nanette McGuinness: Congratulations on the release of your translation of Batu and the Search for the Golden Cup from Russian into English. It’s a wonderful coming-of-age magical adventure and was a bestseller in Kazakhstan. How did the book find its way to you and then to Amazon Publishing? Was it an easy journey or one with many twists and turns? Shelley Fa ..read more

Following on from #WorldKidLitMonth, our guest co-editor Charlotte Graver signs off with this wonderfully insightful interview with Alice Curry, the founder and CEO of UK-based publishing house, Lantana Publishing... Charlotte Graver: Hello and welcome back to the World Kid Lit blog. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Could you firstly start by telling us a bit about Lantana Publishing? How did it come about and what is its mission? Alice Curry: Hello and thanks for having us! I founded Lantana in 2014 so we’ll be celebrating our 10th anniversary next year. I had previo ..read more

by Nanette McGuinness You’ve probably heard about the Caldecott Award (picture books), Newbery Medal (children’s literature), and the Prinz Award (books for teens). But did you know that there are also awards just for graphic novels? The best known are arguably the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, sometimes considered the Academy Awards of the comics world, and there are many others, such as the prestigious Harvey Awards, the Ignatz and Excellence in Graphic Literature. Graphic novels are an extraordinarily versatile genre: advanced readers can enjoy them just as much as reluctant and beginn ..read more

by Shimanto (Robin) Reza  Kid lit is alive and kicking in Flanders and the Netherlands. Decades ago, Lowlands writers gave the world Annie M.G. Schmidt and the Belgian comic. Today, they give us more weird and wondrous reads than I can keep track of. There’s even a press dedicated to translated Dutch picture books, Clavis Publishers. How to choose just three titles for a review? It is of course weird and probably illegal to judge a book by its translator. But like Tess in My Especially Weird Week with Tess, I kind of like weird, so what the heck. By the end of Anna Woltz’s middle-grade no ..read more

Today World Kid Lit co-editor Jackie Friedman Mighdoll interviews Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, one of the great forces behind World Kid Lit. Ruth translated the charming chapter book The Invisible Elephant from Russian to English. The book is coming out next week and available for pre-orders now! I first heard about The Invisible Elephant by Anna Anisimova, illustrated by Yulia Sidneva and translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp when Paula Holmes reviewed it for us in January. In honour of the book launch in August, we are thrilled to have Ruth with us to tell us more about the joys and challenges of transla ..read more