Launch of the Schools' Laureate prize

A professor in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages has launched a new book prize with a difference: the judges are pupils at schools.

In the National Year of Reading, what better idea than to launch a prize awarded by schoolchildren to a recent work of fiction? The principle of the Schools’ Laureate is simple: a group of young readers (from 16-25) reads through the books longlisted for the Booker and International Booker Prizes and selects four for pupils in participating schools to read.

For this first year of the prize, the four books were Jonathan Buckley’s One Boat, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, translated by Deepa Bashti, Anne Serre’s A Leopard-Skin Hat, translated by Mark Hutchinson and Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation. During the course of the term, the pupils in participating schools read and discussed the books and chose two representatives to come up to Oxford and take part in the judging panel. 

The judges in 2026 were drawn from Bolton School, Bolton, Lancs; Camden School for Girls, London ; Greenford High School, Ealing ; Friends’ School, Lisburn, Northern Ireland; The Grey Coat Hospital, London and North London Collegiate School. With the Chair of this year’s prize, Baroness (Shami) Chakrabarti CBE PC, they discussed each of the books in turn. Shami Chakrabarti remarked on the sharpness of their analyses, the courtesy of their exchanges, their capacity to stand up for their ideas but also listen to other people’s suggestions and, at time, change their minds. 

At the ceremony, pupils introduced each of the shortlisted books in turn in thoughtful brief presentations. The announcement of the laureate was preceded by a personal message from H.M. Queen Camilla who saluted ‘a brilliant initiative to create “a book prize awarded by school pupils”’ and looked forward to hearing who the winner was. The pupils chose Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation, commenting on the interesting use of an unreliable narrator and the cross-cultural aspects of the main characters’ lives. 

Professor Catriona Seth FBA of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, who created the prize with the support of the Hawthornden Foundation, said: “It has been wonderful to see everything coming together and to witness the joy in literature which the pupils and their teachers displayed.”