Another week, another two awards…!
On Monday, Ed, Will, AJ and I went to the remarkably grand Stationers’ Hall for The Stationers’ Company’s inaugural Innovation Excellence Awards. We were enormously proud to be one of eleven very diverse winners for our “creative use of multimedia apps for screen-savvy children”.
Ed, Will, and AJ, in the courtyard garden of Stationers’ Hall before the ceremony (typically incompetent photo taken by me, for which the usual apologies)
Other winners included a closed-loop recycling company, a food packager and an online academic research collaboration platform, as well as closer colleagues: Touch Press and Bloomsbury Drama Online also won awards. You can find out more about the 24 nominated companies (I know it doesn’t have the prize winners, but I am doing my best here) here.
Today, Ed, Will, AJ, Tom (all above) and I went to the Booktrust Best Book Awards 2014. Both Little Red Riding Hood and Axel Scheffler’s Flip Flap Farm were shortlisted in the Best Tech Stuff category. Shortlisted titles are voted for by tens of thousands of school children. We were absolutely not expecting to win: other categories (see below) were won by really big names, and we were up against ITV and David Walliams. But Little Red Riding Hood did win, and Ed, who illustrated the app, as well as working on the animation and design of the app, accepted the prize.
Drawing wall at The Booktrust Best Books Award
Here’s the full list of winners (the numbers refer to the ages of the child at whom the book/app is aimed):
0-5 BEST PICTURE BOOK: Peck Peck Peck by Lucy Cousins
6-8 BEST STORY: Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made by Stephan Pastis
9-11 BEST STORY: Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck by Jeff Kinney
9-11 BEST FACT BOOK: The factual award went to Operation Ouch!: Your Brilliant Body by Doctor Chris and Xand van Tulleken
12-14 BEST STORY: The Fault In Our Stars by John Green
0-14 BEST TECH STUFF
Little Red Riding Hood, illustrated by Ed Bryan
Winning prizes is the most fantastic boost and validation of all the work that we do, and it’s tremendously gratifying to have our apps win out against the competition when judged by professional judges, who understand the technology and the innovation involved, and, more importantly, by children themselves.
We’ve had to commandeer another shelf in our trusty Ikea unit so that we can proudly display our collection of awards – not a bad haul in our three-and-a-half years of publishing, we reckon, but perhaps we’re biased.
Here’s the trailer for Little Red Riding Hood, if you’ve not seen the app before:
