The Mildred L. Batchelder Award, or Batchelder Award, is an

American Library Association The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world. History 19th century ...

literary award A literary award or literary prize is an award presented in recognition of a particularly lauded Literature, literary piece or body of work. It is normally presented to an author. Organizations Most literary awards come with a corresponding award c ...

that annually recognizes the publisher of the year's "most outstanding" children's book translated into English and published in the U.S. The Mildred L. Batchelder Award is unusual in that it is given to a publisher yet it explicitly references a given work, its translator and author. It seeks to recognize translations of children's books into the English language, with the intention of encouraging American publishers to translate high quality foreign language children's books and ''"promote communication between the people of the world"''. It is administered by the

Association for Library Service to Children The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) is a division of the American Library Association. ALSC has over 4,000 members, including children, experts in children's literature, publishers, faculty members, and other adults. The Associa ...

(ALSC), the children's division of ALA, and conferred upon the U.S. publisher. The award is named in honor of Mildred L. Batchelder, former director of the ALSC. One of her stated goals was "''to eliminate barriers to understanding between people of different cultures, races, nations, and languages''." The Batchelder Award was inaugurated in 1968 and there have been 47 winners in 48 years through 2015. From 1994 there have been 38 worthy runners-up called Honor Books, one to three each year. The 2015 winner is Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, an imprint of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., for ''Mikis and the Donkey'', translated by Laura Watkinson. The Dutch original ''Mikis, de Ezeljongen'' (2011) was written by Bibi Dumon Tak, illustrated by Philip Hopman.

Mildred L. Batchelder

Batchelder began her career working in an Omaha, Nebraska

Public Library A public library is a library, most often a lending library, that is accessible by the general public and is usually funded from public sources, such as taxes. It is operated by librarians and library paraprofessionals, who are also Civil servic ...

, then as a children's librarian at St. Cloud State Teachers College, and subsequently as librarian of Haven Elementary School in

Evanston, Illinois Evanston is a city in Cook County, Illinois, United States, situated on the North Shore (Chicago), North Shore along Lake Michigan. A suburb of Chicago, Evanston is north of Chicago Loop, downtown Chicago, bordered by Chicago to the south, Skok ...

. She eventually joined the ranks of the

in 1936 spending the next 30 years at the ALA promoting the translation of children's literature.

Criteria

Source: "Batchelder Award terms and criteria" * The award shall be made to an American publisher for a children's book considered to be the most outstanding of those books originally published in a foreign language in a foreign country and subsequently published in English in the United States during the preceding year. * The Award, in the form of a citation, shall be made annually, unless no book of that particular year is deemed worthy of the honor. The translation should be true to original work and retain the viewpoint of the author. * The translation should reflect the style of the author and of the original language. * The book should not be unduly "Americanized." The book's reader should be able to sense that the book came from another country. * Folk literature is not eligible. * Picture books are not eligible unless the text is substantial and at least as important as the pictures. * The book must have the potential to appeal to a child audience (age 0-14). * The overall design of the book should enhance and not detract from the text, thus making the book more or less effective as a children's book. Such aspects might include: illustration, type face, layout, book jacket, etc. * Consideration should be given to the retention of the original illustrator's work in the U.S. edition.

Recipients

Winners are distinguished from Honor Books by yellow background and by 'W' in the far right column.

Multiple awards and honors

E. P. Dutton and Enchanted Lion Books have won five Batchelder Awards, Delacorte Press (Dell) four. Several imprints have won three: Arthur A. Levine Books (Scholastic); Lothrop, Lee & Shepard (HarperCollins); Houghton Mifflin.

Anthea Bell Anthea Bell (10 May 1936 – 18 October 2018) was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish language, Danish. These include ''The Castle (novel), The Castle'' by Franz Kafka, ''Aus ...

's translations from Danish, French and German have won seven mentions, four Awards and three Honors. Hillel Halkin's translations from Hebrew have four awards. Translations from Greek by Edward Fenton have won three, as have translations from Dutch by Laura Watkinson. Several people have translated two Award winners. Uri Orlev writing in Hebrew and Alki Zei writing in Greek were the authors of four and three Award-winning works, all of those translated by Halkin and Fenton respectively. Bjarne Reuter wrote two of the winners in Danish, Bibi Dumon Tak two in Dutch, and Josef Holub two in German. ;Numbers of Awards and Honors by original language

Notes

References

External links

Front Street imprint
book search at Boyds Mill Press
Enchanted Lion Books
publisher
namelos
publisher {{ALA(library) American children's literary awards Awards established in 1968 American Library Association awards Translation awards 1968 establishments in the United States English-language literary awards