Last night (10th November 2025), we were delighted to see Dame Penelope Lively deliver the keynote speech at the Booker Prize ceremony for the 2025 award. Dame Penelope is the only writer to have won both the Booker Prize and the Carnegie Medal for children’s books, and she used her speech to beautifully make the case for the transformative power of children’s books. Her speech came in light of the Booker Prize Foundation’s recent announcement that they would be launching a prize for children’s books.

In her characteristically insightful speech, Dame Penelope discussed the uniquely magical power of children’s books, and the writer’s “license to abandon time and place, to create, to propose alternatives.” She acknowledged that “children who are read to, who read, do better at school,” but argued that this wasn’t really her concern – instead, “what I care about is the climate of the mind, the leap into suggestions of good and evil, of moral imperatives, of social possibilities. Above all, of other worlds.” She praised the Booker Foundation for its recognition of that importance through the new award.

If you would like to listen to Dame Penelope’s full speech, it begins at approximately 11 minutes in on the BBC Sounds podcast. A longer version of the speech will be featured in The Observer. We are incredibly proud to represent Dame Penelope, and are delighted to have had yet another opportunity to celebrate her unique achievements.