Beetle Boy wins Gold in The China 2018 National Children's Book Awards

Beetle Boy has won the Children's Choice Book: Gold Medal for 2018 from a list of the Top Ten Children's Fiction (Adventure Fantasy) selected by Reading Promotion Committee of China Library Association. I cannot tell you how moved and proud I am that Beetle Boy has been bestowed this honour. I was over the moon when I was told we’d reached the longlist of 100 books. I never dreamed we would win, but we did!

35 Chinese libraries, three hundreds schools and 100,000 students are involved in the award. The children cast votes for their favourite books and Beetle Boy won the most votes!

This award was first run in 2014 and was initiated by the Shenzhen Library.

You can READ MORE here, but you will need to click Google Translate.

Here are some pictures I was sent of the ceremony and my publishers in China (Beijing Huaxia  Winshare) accepting the award.

Longlisted for the Blue Peter Book Awards 2019 - The Beetle Collector's Handbook

The Beetle Collector’s Handbook has been longlisted for the Blue Peter Book Awards 2019

Since 2000, the enormously popular and influential Blue Peter Book Awards have been recognising and celebrating the best authors, the most creative illustrators and the greatest reads for children. The Blue Peter Book Awards 2019 celebrates children's books published in the last year in two categories: the Best Story and the Best Book with Facts.

I am over the moon that The Beetle Collector’s Handbook has been selected for the longlist for this prize and have all my fingers crossed.

The Beetle Collector's Handbook at the Natural History Museum

This half term I took a trip to the Natural History Museum to do a wonderful sold out event in the David Attenborough theatre, combining the science in my books with the extraordinary collection of beetles at the museum and with one of my favourite coleopterists, Max Barclay. I even got to go behind the scenes and choose the beetles for the event, which was glorious.

We discussed the featured beetles in the Beetle Boy books and of course Max’s wonderful contribution to The Beetle Collector’s Handbook, which I was signing afterwards. It was a delight to meet so many young people excited about beetles.