Templar at the English Association's 4-11 Picture Book Awards

The lovely Katie Cotton, Editor, has blogged about Templar's success at the English Association's Picture Book Awards

On Wednesday, we were lucky enough to be invited to the rather beautiful (and architecturally impressive) British Academy for the English Association’s 2013 4–11 Picture Book Awards. Templar got two (yes, that’s right, TWO!) of the four prizes, scooping both the Fiction and Non-Fiction awards in the 7–11 category.

Where My Wellies Take Me, by Clare and Michael Morpurgo / illustrated by Olivia Lomenech Gill, won the Fiction award. It’s always lovely to get nice comments on our books, and we especially enjoyed hearing the judges say that this was a book that really celebrated the English countryside, both in terms of natural beauty, through Olivia’s stunning artworks, and the literature it has inspired, by featuring some of the nation’s best-loved poems. How We Make Stuff by Christiane Dorian, illustrated by Beverley Young, won the Non-Fiction award, with the judges praising its innovative and educative use of novelty in explaining difficult concepts.

The worthy winner of Fiction 4–7 was the hilarious Hippospotamus – a tale of a hippopotamus who has a spot on her bottamus from publishing royalty Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross (Andersen Press). The Non-Fiction 4–7 Award went to A First Book of Nature by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Mark Hearld. A little like Wellies in terms of its ‘part poetry, part scrapbook’ feel, this is a gorgeous book from Walker that captures the simple loveliness that is everywhere in nature, if you can only look.

Unfortunately neither of the Morpurgos could make the ceremony, but Christiane, Beverley and Olivia were all invited up to the stage for some award-holding and photo-taking. After a lovely reception, where the other shortlisted books were greedily pawed over by the Templar team and a fair amount of wine was drunk, we moved on to the buzzing café of the ICA for more wine and chatting.

Massive congratulations to our super-talented contributors, and thanks to the English Association for a lovely evening!