October at a glance

It's been a busy month here at Booktrust. We've had prizes galore, lots of interviews and book reviews. Here's a digested guide to things you might have missed across the Booktrust and various bookgifting sites.

Celebrating Mo Yan's Nobel Prize for Literature, we look through our book archives and picked out some of our favourite books by previous Nobel Prize winners.

Former online writer in residence Bali Rai brought the house down at this year's London Book Fair by bringing a panel of teenage readers and asking them to confront publishers and tell them exactly what they wanted to read. We were lucky enough to be able to recreate the event with Usborne publishing, author Chris Ould and a panel of youngsters talking about teen books and crime. You can read the match report here

As part of Dyslexia Awareness Week, Alex Strick wrote about an event she chaired with author Sally Gardener and Hot Key Books.

It's been a busy month for Read for My School, the new national schools reading competition that Booktrust is running in partnership with The Pearson Foundation and with support from the Department for Education. We kicked off with a celebratory launch event on 1 October at The Telegraph Bath Festival of Children's Literature, featuring a speech from our passionate spokesperson, Jeremy Strong, and a performance from a class of year 6 pupils from Oldfield Park Junior School. Primary schools have been signing up to the free initiative in their hundreds, but we want to reach over 1000 by the end of the month, so encourage your local school to register now

As part of our celebration of the short story, we interviewed BBC International Short Story Award 2012 winner Miroslav Penkov and the author of a debut collection The War Tour, Zoe Lambert. Young adult fans will be excited to read an interview with Libby Bray, author of The Diviners.

The Children's Laureate library tour ended on a high. Lauren Ace, Macmillan senior publicity manager and erstwhile Fairy Queen, blogged about her experiences on the road with Julia Donaldson.

Elsewhere, spotted at Morley library taking part in a Bear Hunt... who's that? Ed Balls, Shadow Chancellor! Following on from reaching our 10,000 pledge target, we produced this video celebrating 20 years of Bookstart.

And finally, Pori Drwy Stori is an exciting new national programme for Wales brought to you by Boktrust Cymru. It is a universal programme for four- to five-year-olds funded by the Welsh Government to support literacy in the foundation phase. All children in maintained Welsh primary schools will be eligible for the programme automatically. We are hoping to reach some 35,000 children. Check out the newly-launched website