The DANZ Children’s Book Award, launched for 2024, stands for The Diversity in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand Children's Book Award and has been created to recognise, award, and celebrate diverse children’s fiction. This means a children’s book published in Australia or New Zealand which pushes boundaries, challenges stereotypes, and celebrates diverse and marginalised people and communities.

Diversity can include disability, culture, class, LGBTQI, race, and religion. The diversity portrayed in the book and under which the book is entered must be relevant, obvious, and important to the story.

Authors are not required to identify as "diverse" themselves; however, the submitted work must be sensitively and authentically written without using offensive, inaccurate, harmful, and insensitive tropes and representation. The judging process will be thorough and critical in this regard. The award looks for something new, for inclusivity, and mostly for the celebration of minority people and voices.

WHY?

There have been several recent academic studies, over the past five years, which have extensively researched children’s fiction in Australia and New Zealand, with results showing that there is still an overwhelming lack of diverse representation, from picture books through young adult, yet a high percentage of the population is not white, Australian- or New Zealand-born, abled, middle-class, or heterosexual. To add further concern, many of the books published, and sometimes awarded, over the past ten years which do feature diverse characters and settings, were created by white, middle class, heterosexual, abled people writing often harmful representation that portrays outdated stereotypes and recycles insensitive tropes.

Congratulations to the 2024 DANZ Winners!