Posted Monday August 17th 2009
by Rebecca Wilkie

The shortlists for this year’s Booktrust Early Years Awards have just been announced and I think it’s the strongest in recent years. Animals of all shapes and sizes appear in books across the categories, from Ed Vere’s colourful, pop-up Chick to Emma Dodd’s Miaow Said the Cow, which features a farmyard full of mice mooing, hens oinking and, yes, a cow miaowing!

All the books, selected by a panel of judges including Bookstart founder Wendy Cooling and Radio 1 DJ (and new mother), Edith Bowman, are perfect for sharing.

There is a great mixture of authors and illustrators both emerging and established to choose from, including Babette Cole, who many readers will recognise from the now classic Princess Smarty Pants and Mummy Laid an Egg, who appears in the Pre-School category illustrating Richard Hamilton’s funny tale of a father and daughter swapping lives, If I Were You. Kate Greenaway Medal winner and Big Picture Best New Illustrator, Catherine Rayner is also nominated in this category with Sylvia and Bird; Mara Bergman and Nick Maland with their third rhyming story about Oliver Donnington Rimington-Sneep:  Oliver Who Travelled Far and Wide, make the list too.

The shortlists for the other categories are equally strong with a fantastic range of artistic styles displayed in the Emerging Illustrator category, ranging from collage in Toot Toot Beep Beep, to the striking black, white and orange palette used by Kazuno Kohara in The Haunted House, to Katie Cleminson’s gorgeous, painterly, Box of Tricks featuring Eva and Monty, the giant polar bear she conjures from her box of tricks.

The books in the Baby Book category are all sturdy and offer plenty of opportunity for interaction; the high contrast illustrations in Baby’s First Outdoors Book are perfect for very young eyes to focus on, while Georgie Birkett’s The Big Night-Night Book features curtains to pull back and a furry giraffe to stroke.

Look out for the announcement of the winners on 23 September and in the meantime, post a comment and let us know if you’ve got any favourites from the shortlist.