Welcome to World Kid Lit Month on the Global Literature in Libraries blog! This month, we will hear from librarians all over, with a focus on books and authors from Europe this year. This is the ninth annual celebration of World Kit Lit Month, and there are a number of ways to participate in addition to following along on GLLI. 

New this year, the World Kid Lit Reading Challenge Award is a competition for English-speaking schools anywhere in the world, designed to encourage inclusive and international reading. There are prizes for three different age groups. More information can be found at the link above. Entry forms can be submitted from 1 September through 10 October 2025.

The World Kid Lit website has a number of other great resources, including this thorough guide to 2025 kid lit translations and these creative-commons-licensed images and posters. 

You can also explore some of the #WorldKidLit posts from GLLI here. There is a new #WorldKidLit post every Wednesday on the blog. 

As always, the best way to celebrate World Kid Lit Month is to read! We hope to share some inspiration over the coming days. Please feel free to comment and share some of your favorites!

To start us off, I wanted to quickly share a psychedelic, absurd Czech picture book that I keep coming back to: Puppet, Plum Pit, Plum, Log and Back to Puppet (2018), written by Vojtěch Mašek, illustrated by Chrudoš Valoušek, and translated by Benjamin Lovett (2022). It is a loose update of the Pinocchio story, filled with satire and superb linocut illustrations. 

This interior page gives a clearer idea of what the book is like:

This is definitely a picture book for older readers, and might be best understood and enjoyed alongside a discussion of Pinocchio. It would make a great addition to a collection of new and unusual updates of classic stories. (For a recommendation of a particularly beautiful edition of Pinocchio, see the post I did on “Italian YA in Translation” here on the GLLI blog during #IntYALit Month.)

See you back here tomorrow for more #WorldKidLit Month!

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Kim Beeman is currently living in Rome. Before moving to Italy, Kim spent over a decade in Asia, working as a librarian at Shrewsbury International School in Bangkok and Tanglin Trust School in Singapore. She also co-founded the International School Librarians in Europe conference, and is a member of the advisory board for the Librarians Knowledge Sharing Workshop. Before working in school libraries, Kim worked as a cookbook librarian at The French Culinary Institute in New York City for many years, where she completed the professional culinary program and was certified as a sommelier through the Court of Master Sommeliers.  [LinkedIn]