A stage of the jury’s work for the 2025 Bologna Ragazzi Awards. Image: BCBF
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
See also:
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Bologna Children’s Book Fair’s ‘Grand Tour’ Heads to Angoulême
At BCBF, Bologna Book Plus 2025 Announces an ‘AI Summit’
Italy in India: Bologna Children’s Book Fair Is Honored at Chennai
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Bologna Book Plus 2025 Has Another ‘Audio Forum’ and ‘Ambassador’
The Ragazzi Awards’ 60th Year
As our Publishing Perspectives readers know, one of the most prominent of many high-visibility awards programs in Elena Pasoli‘s Bologna Children’s Book Fair (March 31 to April 3) is the Bologna Ragazzi Awards.
Today (February 19) the Ragazzi Awards have released their 2025 winners. Much attention will be focused this year on the Ragazzis, however, as they reach their 60th year. The Bologna fair, the world’s largest publishing trade show focused on young people’s literature, is only two years older itself, at 62.
And as if to celebrate, the Ragazzi Awards are revealing that they drew a record-breaking 3,858 entries this year—an increase of 15 percent over the 2024 level—with books coming in from 68 countries and regions. Markets making their first submissions this time include Guatemala; Mongolia; Morocco; Nigeria; Qatar; and Vietnam.
During the final week of selection and preparation of the competition results, Pasoli, the jury, and staff were joined in Bologna by Jacks Thomas, guest director of Bologna Book Plus.
The Ragazzis are divided into five permanent categories:
- Fiction
- Nonfiction
- Opera Prima (debut publications by authors and illustrators)
- Comics
- Toddler
The Bologna Ragazzi Awards also include a special category, New Horizons, used by the program’s international juries to assign to a particularly innovative work.
And this is the competition that each year includes a special category. For the 2025 edition, the focus is on sustainability, in line with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the now-famous “SDGs” outlined by the United Nations, with which BCBF began a collaboration during the 2024 fair.
While most of the winners may not have names you recognize, there’s a good chance you’ll know Sharjah’s Bodour Al Qasimi, whose book House of Wisdom with illustrations by Majid Zakeri Younesi is the winner in the Fiction category.
In Sharjah, the House of Wisdom is a tecnologically advanced library facility opened in 2020 at University City by Sharjah’s Sheikh Dr. Sultan Bin Mohammed Al Qasimi. The name of the facility itself is based on Baghdad’s legendary ninth-centiry center of scholarship. Those familiar with the New Regency and Apple TV+ thriller series Prime Target—from director Brady Hood with Leo Woodall starring—by coincidence involves a fictional contemporary discovery of the original House of Wisdom in Iraq.
You can learn more about each of the winners of the 2025 Bologna Ragazzi Awards here. You’ll find not only the winners but also works given special mentions under each of the categories.
Bologna Ragazzi Award Winners: 2025
Fiction
- Title: Title: The House of Wisdom
- Text by: Bodour Al Qasimi
- Illustrations by: Majid Zakeri Younesi
- Publisher: Kalimat Group
- Country: United Arab Emirates, 2024
Nonfiction
- Title: Per mille camicette al giorno (For a Thousand Blouses a Day)
- Text by: Serena Ballista
- Illustrations by: Sonia Maria Luce Possentini
- Publisher: Orecchio Acerbo
- Country: Italy, 2024
Sustainability
- Title: Art Is a Voice
- Text and illustrations by: Kripa
- Publisher: Art1st Enterprises
- Country: India, 2024
Opera Prima (debut)
- Title: If You Want to Eat a Red Apple
- Text by: Jin Joo
- Illustrations by: Ga Hee Lee
- Publisher: Finger Publishing
- Country: South Korea, 2024
Toddler
- Title: Le coq polyglotte (The Multilingual Cockerel)
- Text and illustrations by: Marie Darme-Rizzo
- Publisher: Hélium
- Country: France, 2024
Comics: Early Reader
- Title: Gutenachtgeschichten für Celeste: Ein sehr gruseliges Bilderbuch (Bedtime Stories for Celeste: A Very Scary Picture Book)
- Text and drawings by: Nikolaus Heidelbach and Ole Könnecke
- Publisher: Carl Hanser Verlag
- Country: Germany, 2024
Comics: Middle Grade
- Title: Dita Dor (Dictator)
- Text and drawings by: António Jorge Gonçalves
- Publisher: Edições Assembleia da República
- Country: Portugal, 2024
Comics: Young Adult
- Title: La Trahison d’Olympe, Livre 1 (The Betrayal of Olympe, No. 1)
- Text and drawings by: Jean Dalin
- Publisher: Sarbacane
- Country: France, 2024
New Horizons
- Title: Dalla finestra (From the Window)
- Text by: Laura Cattabianchi
- Illustrations by: Laura Cattabianchi and Patrizio Anastasi
- Publisher: Start Edizioni
- Country: Italy, 2024
Honorable Mention
- Title: Raíces del bosque (Roots of the Forest)
- Text by: Paulina Jara
- Illustrations by: da Marcos Guardiola
- Publisher: Editorial Amanuta
- Country: Chile, 2021
Organizers today are pointing out that one of the most valuable elements of these awards is that a Ragazzi winner can be spotted at the fair and attract the interest of international translation and publication ritghts buyers.
Trends Cited by the Ragazzi Awards Program
Perhaps of most value to professionals in the industry are the trends that can be found in a review of nearly 4,000 submitted books from such a broad international field. Several points from the insights provided:
- Children’s publishing is increasingly using the picture-book format as a space for experimentation capable of accounting for life’s complexity and the poetics of childhood. The graphic-artistic language ranges from the most classical forms to the most daring experiments, using new perspectives to reinvent even the classic fairy tales, a constant in titles for children.
- Topical ranges found in leading entries feature the day-to-day lives of children, their body language and play, and also the social and political issues that influence their lives, as well as their important philosophical and existential questions concerning time, symbols, science, death, transformation, relationships, and pain.
- The same themes are found in stories about children’s rights and a sustainable world, which are expressed in the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. These include the right to expression, participation, housing, and education, as well as, above all, the right to live in friendship, collaboration, and peace.
- Aspects of sustainability are not only limited to their own special category, however. They feature in different narratives from nonfiction to fiction, and even comics. These books explain, present, and imagine possibilities: for example, the case of bicycles and the many adventures that children have while riding them.
Finally, it’s being mentioned that the theme of birth features more frequently than in previous editions of the award.
Birth as a natural act and, at the same time, imbued with feelings of mystery, discovery, and events that often take new parents by surprise. This theme points to change taking place nowadays with falling birth rates affecting countries in many parts of the world and is being reinterpreted by publishers and authors who are in some cases separated by great distances.
The Ragazzi Cross Media Awards
A companion program, the Bologna Ragazzi Cross Media Awards, has also had an increase in entries, which included, we’re told, artificial intelligence and immersive installations for increasingly accessible content—as the European Accessibility Act‘s implementation looms in late June.
The Cross Media Awards were added to accommodate the expansion of various digital media and today relates to some of the developmental momentum for books found in video games, animation, and other formats and scenarios.
The best way to eplicate this is with an example. In the image to the right, for instance, you’re seeing the cover of Star Papa, a book published by Book Gorae with an immersive video experience.
This South Korean work is about a farmer who grows stars. (Is that cool or what?) Here are details of this work:
Winner, cross media projects 2025
Immersive video experience
Prodotto da: K3I Co., Ltd.
Country: South Korea
More on Bologna Children’s Book Fair is here, more on children’s books is here, more on the Italian market is here, more on the world industry’s vast field of book and publishing awards is here, and more on world publishing’s trade shows and book fairs is here.