5/24 Awards for Muswell Hill Children’s Bookshop

The Muswell Hill Children’s Bookshop has won Children’s Bookseller of the Year and Best Book Retailer of the Year at the prestigious British Book Awards, run by publishing trade magazine The Bookseller. In the picture, the Children’s Bookshop owner, Sanchita Basu De Sarkar with BBC presenter Lauren Laverne and CBBC presenter Rhys Stephenson.

The bookshop celebrates its 50th anniversary this year,  making it the longest-standing children’s bookstore in the country. It holds book signings with children’s authors including Michael Rosen, Julia Donaldson and David Walliams.

On its website, the Bookseller says that the Children’s Bookshop has always supported new as well as big names, and it’s put diversity and inclusion at the core of its offering in recent years, supporting Black, Asian and minority ethnic and LGBTQ+ authors and illustrators. It helped run the UCL/ESEA festival for writers from East and South East Asia (ESEA Lit Fest) and supported numerous charities and community projects. All this makes the outstanding shop not just the 2024 Children’s Bookseller of the Year but the overall Book Retailer of the Year. “It’s everything a children’s bookshop should be,” said the judges, “They get stellar sales, even for a great catchment area like Muswell Hill, and are so much more than a bookseller.” 

To celebrate its 50th Anniversdary, The Children’s Bookshop has launched a writing competition for children 5-15, deadline 31 May 2024. For more information about this and all other events, go to https://www.childrensbookshoplondon.com/competition.