The home of new Black-British children's writers
The Jericho Prize for Children's Writing is a not-for-profit Community Interest Company (CIC) that supports emerging, unpublished and self-published Black-British children's writers.
With our writing competition and education programme, our mission is to break down barriers in traditional children's publishing and showcase Black-British writing talent.
We started in 2021 and have supported hundreds of Black writers in the UK, offering a launchpad for their careers as children's book authors.
What do we do?
We offer a biennial writing competition for emerging Black-British children's writers aged 18 plus. Our 2022/23 'Best picture book script (3+)' winner, Antoinette Brooks, won a publishing contract with Scholastic UK.
We also run a writer development programme in conjunction with UK publishers, designed to challenge the status quo in UK publishing. This includes invaluable resources such as our Picture Book Foundation Course, our Picture Book Script Clinic and our Rhyming Picture Books workshop, all offered in 2024.
In 2023 we also provided fantastic events with former Waterstones Children's Laureate Joseph Coelho, award-winning authors Patrice Lawrence and Nathan Byron, and agents Lydia Silver and Davinia Andrew-Lynch.
All of our opportunities and resources are free of charge to writers.
What will your donation support?
We are running the writing competition again in 2025 and are planning further free writer resources into 2026.
As a not-for-profit organisation, we are entirely dependent on funding to keep these desperately needed resources going.
Your donation will help us with:
- our adminstrative costs for running the competition
- putting together the best prize packages for our competition winners
- funding new mentoring opportunities for emerging Black-British writers
- paying creatives to produce brilliant new writer resources
- funding special projects like our 2024 illustrator-in-residence, Cabbi Charles
The Jericho Prize receives some external funding but this is never enough to cover everything we need to do.
Please donate what you can and help us realise our mission to support a new generation of Black-British children's writers.