by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
Brace yourselves for a very exclamation-mark-filled blog post today because we can’t contain our excitement as we approach 10 years of World Kid Lit!
The first World Kid Lit Month was launched in 2016 and since then our community of readers, reviewers and booklovers raving about world literature for young people has grown enormously. Our blog and social media feature books, authors, illustrators, translators and publishers from every corner of the planet, and our community includes readers and contributors based on every continent of the globe.
We need you … to help more readers hear about World Kid Lit Month, and start discovering children’s and YA books from around the world. See below for how you can get involved this World Kid Lit Month, and read on for a numerical glimpse at our impact in ten busy years of reading the world…
1 new reading award for schools to promote global citizenship and reading for pleasure! See here for last year’s winners and how to enter this September
4 bingo charts to inspire your global reading journey this summer or in September – World Kid Lit Month
10 free book bundles for primary and secondary schools to mark 10 years of World Kid Lit; please nominate a school. This is on top of the 3 book bundles waiting for the winners of the 2026 Schools International Reading Award
10 volunteers running our blog and social media accounts. Immense thanks to everyone for their time, energy, enthusiasm and expertise, and to the many other volunteers who have contributed to this project over the past 9 years
15 downloadable age-specific themed booklists recommending books from every continent, with more coming over the summer
50+ contributors to World Kid Lit blog. Humongous thanks to everyone who has written book reviews, interviews and features over the busy past 9 years!
We’ve published over 60 blog posts per year! For the last year, we’ve been posting weekly with tons of extras in September, World Kid Lit Month.
64 languages in our database of translations: children’s and young adult books translated into English. Our list goes back to 2017 and is the most comprehensive list worldwide of books for young people in translation, published anywhere in the world. But we still have gaps and are adding to it all the time.
163 countries featured on our blog, including book reviews, booklists and interviews with book creators and publishers. But we have many more countries still to travel to by book. You can help us out by proposing a book review; see below.
World Kid Lit blog has been viewed in 216 countries; that’s almost every country or territory in the world! Reading figures vary from 165,992 views in the USA to just one view from a reader each in Samoa, British Virgin Islands, Chad, Suriname, San Marino, Solomon Islands, French Polynesia, Equatorial Guinea, Congo – Brazzaville, St. Barthélemy and Anguilla. Help us reach more readers across the globe!
430 posts on our Instagram account since we started it in 2020
624 blog posts to date since we started in September 2016. Wowee!
1801 members of our Facebook group, World Kid Lit: World Literature For Young People. Please join and invite other border-crossing book lovers!
1933 children’s and young adult books listed in our translations database. With the help of many contributors in the publishing world, this list is growing all the time and is the most comprehensive list of translated children’s books worldwide.
3409 subscribers to our Instagram account!
Join Us!
As you can see, the World Kid Lit reading community is global and growing all the time. But we need your help to spread the word about World Kid Lit Month! Here are three ways you can get involved:
Take the World Kid Lit Month challenge this this September! Whether you take the mini challenge and read one children’s/YA book from another country, or the mega challenge and go for all 9 in one of our World Kid Lit Month bingo charts, share what you read on the socials with #WorldKidLitMonth. The mega challenge is perfect for a whole family reading together, for a class reading project, or a team activity for you and your bookish colleagues.
We want grown-ups across the world to discover the joy of international children’s and YA literature, but ultimately our main goal is to get more diverse literature into the hands of young people. Please tell the teachers and lobby the librarians in your life: point them to the Schools International Reading Award, to our blog, our insta, and to how to nominate schools for free book bundles. Thank you for spreading the word!
Write for us! Send in your proposals for book reviews for September – our 10th World Kid Lit Month! Our preference is for 3 book reviews on a theme, or lists of 10 books for a theme/country/language, with super short reviews. We’re always open to other ideas too, so get in touch about interviews or features you’d like to write. See here for what we mean when we talk about world literature for young people, and here for our submissions guide and book reviews template. Send your reviews using that template by 15 July. We can’t wait to read them!
World Kid Lit 