by Paula Holmes and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

We’re always excited to see how readers worldwide respond to World Kid Lit Month. “World literature” means different things to different people, and what’s so exciting about social media is how we can use the hashtag #worldkidlit or #worldkidlitmonth to discover a huge diversity of kid lit events happening locally, internationally, in person and online, and find recommended books from every corner of the globe. Here are few highlights from this month, including many book reviews and events we came across thanks to the hashtag that brings our global reading community together, #worldkidlitmonth.

New books launched

Guyanan children’s stories reissued

SOAS in London, the University of Repair, and Professor Patricia Rodney, of The Walter Rodney Foundation (WRF), hosted the book launch of Walter Rodney’s children’s books Kofi Baadu and Lakshmi – two books which tell the history of the Africans and Indians who came to Guyana, and their transformation to becoming a united people. First published in 1980, these are now republished in an upgraded edition with more colour images & archival context, produced with the help of the project Decolonising the Archive.

Alphabet City Kids: Story Hour with Marika Maijala

After years of following the translation journey of the Finnish children’s book Ruusun Matka coming to the US as Rosie Runs, Paula had the thrill of attending Marika Maijala’s Pittsburgh event at City of Asylum Bookstore – an independent bookstore in Pittsburgh’s Northside that supports global and translated literature. As always, they had a fabulous display of translated titles.

City of Asylum book display for World Kid Lit Month. Photo courtesy of Jen Kraar

Marika Maijala drawing at the City of Asylum Bookstore.

Paula introducing Marika Maijala. They did not plan their outfits in advance!

New middle grade fiction from Arabic

Co-founder of World Kid Lit Month, and energetic translator and advocate of Arabic kid lit, Marcia Lynx Qualey shared some photos of her new translation from Arabic, The Number 25, which includes not just a #namethetranslator credit but also a translator portrait!

Reviews and readings

Global Literature In Libraries Initiative have been looking back at 5 years of the GLLI Translated YA Book Prize, winners of which have included excellent fiction and graphic novels from Brazil, Finland, Colombia, Japan, Equitorial Guinea, Sweden, Netherlands, Palestine, Germany, Italy, and more.

GLLI’s World Kid Lit Wednesday book reviews this month have included What the Dark Sounds Like from India; Colorful Mondays: A Bookmobile Spreads Hope in Honduras; Wounded Falcons from Colombia; and When Dad’s Hair Took Off from Germany – also featured on Jill! reading series over on YouTube, which has included translated kid lit readings from Chinese, Farsi, Portuguese, French and German this month.

Meanwhile, Translators Aloud had some fabulous readings this month, too, including Avery Fischer Udagawa’s translation of The House of the Lost on the Cape (Japan), Karen Marston’s reading of Yara’s Forest, Marshall Yarbrough’s translation of Ludwig and the Rhinoceros, and Never Tell Anyone Your Name (YA from Uruguay – translated by our own blog co-editor Claire Storey!).

Over at Words Without Borders, World Kid Lit Month: Read Around Asia featured 2023 releases from South Korea, China, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Turkey, Indonesia and Japan. Pictured here is Na Willa and the House in the Alley from Indonesia.

We love how some #WorldKidLitMonth book tweets are links to full reviews by book bloggers, and some are 2 words or a smiley emoji. They are all wonderful. Every social media post about an inclusive children’s book is a ticket for another reader to find their way to that book.

World Kid Lit bingo

This year’s bingo chart of reading prompts proved a big hit! There are endless ways to explore the categories included: whether you take one idea from the chart like “a book translated from, of featuring, a LANGUAGE SPOKEN BY A FRIEND”, and use it as a starting point to explore the World Kid Lit website resources, and find a new book to borrow from the library.

Others took a colour theme as a challenge to root around the books on their kids’ shelves and think about how globally representative they are. Here are some instagram reels from @abc_africanbooksforchildren, and @attic.anne for inspiration if you want to play #WorldKidLitMonth bingo this weekend. It will stay here on the website if you’re looking for reading ideas throughout the year…

And a few super-keen readers took the bingo chart as a challenge to find a book for every category, like librarian Anne from Aotearoa New Zealand. Don’t miss her incredible twitter/X thread here and her fuller reviews on her blog!

Global reading in the library and the classroom

There was an excellent feature over at Publishers Weekly about teachers who include translated and bilingual children’s books in the classroom, as part of a curriculum of reading that includes books from and set in other countries and continents. Fabulous to see World Kid Lit regular contributor Lori Sieling, who is a K–1 special education teacher, and global picture book explorer at My Kids Read the World, where she reviews international picture books with the aim of helping other teachers and students read beyond borders.

UK charity Literacy Hive published Why Celebrate World Kid Lit Month? – a guide for primary/elementary school teachers, and high school English teachers, on bringing global literature into the curriculum.

Marathon Country Public Library shared a lovely video of a few recent classics, and shared the link to their impressive catalogue of translated titles for young readers. Tacoma Public Library also shared their top selection of kids’ and YA literature from around the world.

Bromley Libraries in London, UK, have been sharing their librarians’ favourite global reads, as well as hosting several World Kid Lit Month events for kids including a picture book session exploring the work of Beatrice Alemagna. There’s a great report of an event on translation for 8- and 9-year-olds they ran with charity Outside In World, highlighting the importance of exploring translation within the context of diverse and inclusive world literature more broadly, as the range of languages represented in translation is still limited and very Eurocentric – though happily we’re seeing the numbers grow year on year. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the video about OIW’s collection of translated children’s literature – the largest in the UK – at University of Portsmouth.

Also in the UK, Guanghwa Bookshop and Charing Cross Library hosted a day of nursery rhymes, stories and Chinese folkstories to celebrate ESEA (East and South East Asian) Heritage Month & Mid-Autumn Festival.

Yet to be translated…

As always another highlight of World Kid Lit Month is seeing recommendations of children’s books not yet translated, and that perhaps should be – a fabulous resource year round for bilingual families, multilingual libraries, and the publishing industry alike. We hope a few publishers remember to check back through #worldkidlitmonth recommendations, like this one from BeeLingoTheka: “Wrapping up #WorldKidLitMonth with “Lato na Rodos” by #katarzynaryrych. Beautiful – about tolerance, friendship & otherness. No English translation available so we’re reading it in our home language Polish.”

National literature institutions are making great use of #WorldKidLitMonth these days to showcase great books not yet published in English, although often translated samples are available. Hungarian Literature Online highlighted a few including Emma csöndje (Emma’s Quiet), an award-winning story of a loving, anxious little girl who finds solace in sea creatures.

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We couldn’t possibly include everything that’s happened this busy World Kid Lit Month. For more, you’ll just have to delve into the hashtag on social media yourself. And no doubt you’ll head straight down to your local library to request the many books you’ll find yourself wanting to read! Happy travels wherever your reading takes you.

About Paula Holmes

Paula still identifies as a children’s librarian, although it has been quite some time since she received a paycheck. She has served in a variety of volunteer capacities for the Association for Library Service to Children (a division of the American Library Association), USBBY (The United States Board on Books for Young People) and currently as a University of Alabama MLIS National Advisory Board Member. Paula is known to create tiny collage art, support translations of children’s literature, practice ballet, and still loves learning Finnish.  

About Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

Ruth is a literary translator, who translates fiction and non-fiction from Russian, German and Arabic. She has translated children’s books from Germany, Morocco, Palestine, Russia, Switzerland and Syria. Ruth is a passionate advocate for diversity and global inclusion in children’s publishing and in the classroom, and she loves giving talks and workshops in schools about translation and reading the world through children’s books. The only time she’s not reading or talking about books is when she’s swimming, playing samba or sleeping!