Children’s Booker Prize introduced

Britain’s most prestigious literary prize is getting a younger sibling.

The Booker Prize Foundation announced last week that it is setting up the Children’s Booker Prize alongside its existing awards for English-language and translated fiction.

Like its sister prizes, the children’s award comes with a 50,000 pound ($67,000) purse.

The prize will open for submissions early next year and the inaugural award will be handed out in 2027, with the winner picked by a jury of children and adults led by writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Britain’s current children’s laureate.

Cottrell-Boyce, whose books include the Carnegie Medal-winning “Millions,” said he was “buzzing” about the prospect.

Funded by the arts, environment and education charity AKO Foundation, the new award will be open to fiction from any country aimed at children aged 8 to 12, either written in English or translated, and published in the U.K. or Ireland.

Booker Prize Foundation Chief Executive Gaby Wood said the prize aimed to inspire more young people to read and be “a seed from which we hope future generations of lifelong readers will grow.”