We Have a Winner

This may be old news to some of you, but we have tallied votes from around the world (including Italy, the British Virgin Islands, and Kazakhstan) and are ready to declare our winner. Fiona Robinson’s hilarious picture book What Animals Really Like (Abrams, 2011), which delivers a subtle message about the dangers of stereotyping, is this year’s winner of the Irma S. Black & James H. Black Award for Excellence in Children’s Literature. Congratulations Fiona!

Also, this marks the first time in the award’s 40-year history that all four finalists were authors and illustrators. Congrats also to our 2012 Honor Books:

• Peter Brown’s You Will Be My Friend (Little, Brown) about the difficulty of making new friends
• Dan Yaccarino’s All the Way to America: The Story of A Big Italian Family and a Little Shovel (Knopf) the true story of four generations of an Italian-American family
• Jon Klassen’s I Want My Hat Back (Candlewick) about a bear whose hat goes missing.