The Booker Foundation announced on Friday what it called its most ambitious project in twenty years: the launch of a Children’s Booker Prize. Well, heavens: what am I to do with that? As a columnist, most of my business is moaning and carping. Happiness, as it is said, writes white, and the default position of the comment hack in search of a subject is to find something that annoys him. Aerodynamically speaking, if you’re throwing something from the cheap seats towards the stage, you get a whole lot more range and accuracy when you’re throwing a beer-bottle full of piss than when you’re throwing a bouquet.

And yet, here is something that, walk around it as I will, prodding and muttering, I can find nothing to complain about. I’m amazed that it hasn’t been thought of before. To inaugurate a children’s version of probably the most prestigious English-language book prize does two things, and both are good.

Anything that helps get great books into children’s hands is to the good

In the first place, it effectively recognises something that is often ignored: which is that writing for children requires no less literary craft than writing for adults; and that, sometimes, it involves more. It is absolutely deserving of the attentions of skilled literary critics.

In the second place, it acknowledges not only the artfulness but the importance of what we read as children and what we give our children to........

© The Spectator