by Jackie Friedman Mighdoll and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

It’s the last day of September, and the end of World Kid Lit Month 2024. Sob! It can’t be over already. On the other hand, the list of books we want to read has grown tall with all the recommendations from our community. If your pile isn’t toppling over, check out our blog posts this month. We visited over 25 countries in our book reviews!

You’ll find more great world literature reading tips over at the SCBWI blog, where together with the children’s book writing, illustrating and translator community we’ve been on a speedy tour of Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania and Asia.

The World Kid Lit Month feature at Pen & Inc., the UK librarian association CILIP’s magazine for diversity and inclusion in libraries, was packed full of reading ideas. Over at Global Literature in Libraries Initiative, there was an incredible month of Taiwanese Kid Lit, Words Without Borders ran a feature on Latin American kid lit, and librarian Anne Coppell in Aotearoa/New Zealand started a whole new blog especially to introduce children’s literature from Oceania to the world. 

Translators Aloud shared kid lit readings of translations from Japanese, Russian, Swedish, Greek, and Estonian, and Jill! also featured translator readings from Greek, Galician, Danish, French, Lithuanian, and one more from Danish. Thank you to all the translators sharing the work of these brilliant authors and illustrators with us (and taking us to the beautiful Estonian coast!).

One of our longer-term goals for World Kid Lit Month has been to make ourselves superfluous eventually. Or if not superfluous exactly, we want to have the excitement carried and shared by other readers including reviewers, librarians, educators, parents, kids and children’s book fans. 

This year, it’s been fun to see book lists generated by bookstores, recommendations on social media, and in-person displays. We were thrilled when Publishers’ Weekly did an in-depth series of articles on translation in children’s publishing for World Kid Lit Month, and when UKLA (UK Literacy Agency) ran a series of members’ recommendations. There were reviews at European Literature Network and publisher interviews at New Books in German. Fabulous to see so many people across education, publishing and library sectors getting involved in promoting international literature for young people.

Our posting frequency will slow down a little over the next few months, but do not fear. We’ve got many good things planned for the coming months including more interviews with authors, illustrators and translators, reviews of books from Colombia, Nigeria and Slovenia, and a cross-cultural exploration of picture books.

If you’d like to read the world in your family or your school, you’ll find reading prompts and book lists on our resources pages. And it’s easy to search our blog – though we warn you, there’s a lot to explore as we’ve already published some 540 blog posts over the years!

If you’d like to review books for us or interview an expert in the field, please do reach out. Or if you’d like to join us at any of our upcoming World Kid Lit virtual socials for people who love reading, talking, and writing about international children’s literature, send us a note. We don’t think there’s a nicer, more interesting, funnier, more beautiful community of people out there. Though we may be a little biased!

So we’re not going to say goodbye to World Kid Lit Month – more like adieu or zàijiàn. We’ll see you all soon–definitely on the web, maybe in person? In the meantime, happy reading!