Sharing the joy! Here’s a recording of our Global Literature in Libraries Initiative announcement on #InternationalChildrensBookDay of our third year of #GLLITranslatedYALitBookPrizeWinners, done in celebration with Rutgers Library. Rutgers is creating an International Youth Collection of titles, including all of our GLLI award winners. Already the Rutgers IYCLibGuide on International Youth Literature is a fantastic resource and librarians just debuted and explained it at this meeting. They will walk you through how to use it in this video. Our MC for the event was GLLI founding board member and children’s nonfiction book author, Professor Marc Aronson.

This meeting featured beloved collection development librarian Betsy Bird sharing international picture book recommendations with flair, Czech native, & McArthur Genius Grant Award Winner Peter Sis, reading Komodo, his picture book about dragons, Hans Christian Andersen Award-winning Brazilian illustrator Roger Mello sharing his world-famous illustrations, and our Japanese-speaking GLLI board member & Translated YA Lit Book Prize committee chair David Jacobson reciting utterly charming poetry in Japanese with English subtitles of Japanese poetess Misuzu Kaneko. No wonder David wrote a book about her!

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners of the GLLI Translated YA Lit Book Prize! Now after three years, GLLI has forty titles we have recommended to the teenagers of the world (2019 winners are here, 2020 winners are here). May reading about each other help them see themselves in each other, enabling more global collaboration in the future.

Would you like to purchase any of these titles? Check out our fancy new Global Literature in Libraries Initiative bookshop. GLLI will earn a small commission from every book purchase you make through our shop, no matter the title. Why not bookmark our Bookshop so you can use it again and again? Thank you!

Karen Van Drie

Executive Director

Global Literature in Libraries Initiative