Little Rebels Award: Celebrating 10 years of radical books
T
HE Little Rebels Award for Radical Children’s Fiction – currently celebrating its tenth year – was born
when a group of booksellers got together to establish the Alliance of Radical Booksellers, a supportive network of radical bookshops in the UK. The ARB itself came at a time when radical bookshops had declined dramatically in number since the mid 1980s. But, happily, since the ARB’s formation in 2010, a steady stream of new start-up shops have joined, and radical bookselling appears to be undergoing a modest resurgence.
It’s a similar path to independent bookshops in general: in stark decline for many years, and now, finally, starting to grow in number again – though in both cases, numbers are still far below where they used to be.
Alternative voices
Indies and radical bookshops have always had an important role to play in the book trade, promoting small publishers and marginalised voices, and fostering a sense of community in their local areas. And radical bookshops consistently lend support and provide spaces of resistance and rebellion amid the social justice struggles of our time, from antiracism to LGBTQ+ rights to climate activism.
By nature, they are in opposition to corporate capitalism and market- driven bookselling: many best-selling
titles will never make it to their shelves. While the children’s shelves in major chain booksellers often seem to be endlessly dominated by a small handful of celebrity authors, not- for-profit booksellers make space for alternative voices and a richer mix of narratives.
One of the first things the ARB did was to establish two book awards: the Bread & Roses Award for non- fiction adult publishing, and the Little Rebels Award for Radical Children’s Fiction. Long-established radical children’s booksellers, Letterbox Library set up and ran the award in its first years, later joined by Housmans Bookshop to help coordinate.
It was hoped that the Little Rebels Award would both celebrate the radical children’s fiction already being published, and that it would foster further interest and support for these types of stories, actively encouraging publishers to seek out more political writing for children, and emboldening authors to be radical and rebellious in their storytelling.
From the beginning, there was naturally some uncertainty from publishers as to what ‘radical’ children’s fiction might be. The award’s guidelines define it as fiction that:
is informed by any of the following: anti-discriminatory, environmental, socialist, anarchist, feminist concerns; OR promotes social equality or challenges stereotypes and/or the status quo or builds children’s awareness of issues in
Catherine Barter (@okayjane) is a YA Author (We Played With Fire ISBN 9781839130069, Troublemakers ISBN 9781783445240, both published by Andersen Press), bookseller at Housmans books and co-founder of the Little Rebels Awards.
society; OR promotes social justice and a more peaceful and fairer world.
Shortlisted and winning books over the 10 years of the award have explored topics as wide-ranging as the impact of warfare on children (Nadine Kadaan’s After Tomorrow and A. M. Dassu’s Boy, Everywhere, for instance); philosophical questions on the nature of thought and identity (Viviane Schwarz and Alexis Deacon’s I Am Henry Finch); Britain’s role in the slave trade (Freedom by Catherine Johnson); fear of ‘the other’ (The New Neighbours by Sarah McIntyre; The
Autumn-Winter 2022
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