Foreign Rights

30 years supporting Children & Young Adult literature

It is edebe awards’ 30th anniversary and we feel grateful and proud to keep going on! This year the winners are two well known Children and YA authors with a long and renowned career. Participation in the contest is anonymous and, every year, the jury launches its hypothesis about who is behind the winning escrow and always gets surprised. But the truth is that since 1993, this jury has read and awarded wonderful stories, discovered new writers and, in sum, contributed to consolidating author’s careers.

We are so proud of our jury’s intuition that we will not stop vindicating them. The first year of the contest, they awarded a 28 years old unknown Carlos Ruiz Zafón, who won the Young-adults award with El Príncipe de la Niebla (The Prince of Mist); three of the wining works has later obtained the Spanish National Children & YA Award, ratifying them as exceptional works in their genre: La isla de Bowen (Bowen’s Island), by César Mallorquí, Palabras envenenadas (Poisoned Words) by Maite Carranza and in 2020 El efecto Frankentein (Frankenstein Effect) by Elia Barceló.

But the influence of our award has no borders: the 27 past winning works have more than 143 international editions, have been published in 25 different countries and in 22 different languages (from French, German, Dutch, Italian or Portuguese to Persian, Hebrew, Russian, Korean or Chinese). From those are to mention, the winner of the 2013 Children category Musgo (Moss) by David Cirici who obtained the prestigious Strega Ragazzi award in 2017 with its Italian edition, and the YA title Palabras envenenadas (Poisoned Words) by Maite Carranza who has 16 international editions.

A total of 239 original works have participated in this 30th edition. The winners will be endorsed with a total of 55.000 Euros (30.000 for the YA title and 25.000 for the children’s title) being one of the best paid Children & Young-Adult award of Spain. Last year, the winners were Juan Ramón Santos with El Club de las Cuatro Emes (Four M’s Club) and Pablo Gutiérrez with the extraordinary work El síndrome de Bergerac (Bergerac Syndrome). The works will be published in paper, ebook and also audiobook (thanks to an agreement with Storytel) next March and they will be published in Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Euskera as well as in Braille.