Alongside The National Literacy Trust, we are pleased to support Oscar’s Book Prize, the children’s book award set up in memory of Oscar Ashton, the son of Evening Standard columnist James Ashton. The £5,000 award for the best book published in 2016 for children aged five or under pays tribute to Oscar’s love of stories.
Claudia Winkleman will be joining this year’s panel of judges, along with two other new judges: Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of the 2015 memoir The Last Act of Love, and Dan Mucha, UK Director of Books at Amazon. As in previous years, Oscar’s parents, James Ashton and Viveka Alvestrand will also be on the panel.
Amazon started life as a bookseller, and we are passionate about helping more children discover the joy of reading. It’s a privilege to support Oscar’s Book Prize, a competition which puts the love of stories above all else and encourages parents to read to their children from a young age.
Amazon’s support of Oscar’s Book Prize forms part of our Amazon in the Community programme which focuses on helping children and young people succeed in the digital world by creating a positive learning environment, developing essential skills in literacy and science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), and empowering them to find and develop their career.
As part of our support for improving children’s literacy, we also signed the National Literacy Trust’s Vision for Literacy Business Pledge, a nationwide initiative to elevate the literacy issue within businesses and take practical action to close the literacy gap and create a fairer society. Amazon already works with Beanstalk to improve literacy in schools by funding reading helpers who support children who need extra help with their reading, and we run the Kindle Reading Fund to donate Kindles and books to schools in and around our sites across the UK.
