The ALA Awards will be announced at the end of the January. Since moving to France in 2019, I have taken a break from my blog but before the new awards are announced, I’d like to mention the 2022 Batchelder Winner.
The Batchelder Award is given to the most outstanding children’s book originating in a language other than English in a country other than the United States, and subsequently translated into English for publication in the United States.
The 2022 prize was awarded to Temple Alley Summer, written by Sachiko Kashiwaba and illustrated by Miho Satake. It was translated from the Japanese by Avery Fischer Udagawa (a fellow SCBWI member) and published by Restless Books, “an international publisher for a world in motion.”
Originally published in Japanese in 2011 as “Kimyōji Yokochō no Natsu,” the book tells the story of Kazu, who days before the beginning of summer vacation discovers a ghostly figure in a white kimono slipping out of his home. Kazu is driven to discover the secret of the sudden appearance of a new classmate who looks remarkably like this ghostly entity.
