National Share a Story Month 2025 Competitions and Resources
Community Reading Event Competition
We are keen to find and reward the best community reading events and are inviting schools, libraries and community groups to hold an outdoor, story-sharing celebration for children and are. Make sure you book your date for the summer term. Thanks to the generosity of over twenty leading publishers, there are generous prizes of bundles of books from our National Share a Story Month booklist and free author visits from two inspiring authors: Anna Goodall and Lucy McRobert.
As humans have known since the birth of language, great stories are the greater for sharing. As our celebrations are not just about finding stories to enjoy but about sharing them too, this year we are running a national competition to find the best community story sharing event. We are very excited to see all the creative ways you have found to share the joy of reading with others.
All the information you need about this competition can be downloaded below
Community Reading Event competition.
Organising a community reading event
If you have never organised a community reading event before, check this NSSM event checklist for useful advice and checklists from Louisa Farrow, National Share-a-Story Month Coordinator.
Closing date 23rd June 2025
Blue’s Planet competition
As we love to hear new stories too, we are delighted to announce a new competition grown from the Blue’s Planet series of books by Lucy McRobert and published by Sweet Cherry Publishing. In keeping with Blue’s spirit, Sweet Cherry are inviting children and young readers to become environmental reporters and shine a light on real-life environmental issues in their own communities.
Information about the competition and how to enter can be downloaded below
Booklist
This year’s is ‘Changing the World, One Book at a Time’, and we have chosen to interpret this from an environmental perspective. Over the past six months, we have been exploring a strikingly rich seam of books that encourage environmental awareness and responsibility to add to our NSSM25 booklist. Of course, there are lots of information books on this subject, but we have been looking primarily for fiction. What a fabulous range of titles there were to choose from: how to pick from such richness?
Thinking about environmental damage can be a gloomy subject. We wanted to make sure that we were offering a hopeful narrative that stressed positive changes as well as how to mitigate harm.
We wanted to include a variety of genres, including graphic novels and poetry as well as picture books and novels of different lengths, different complexity and that demand different levels of emotional maturity, acknowledging that children have different reading preferences.
It was important to us to find inclusive titles that reflected the diversity of many of our communities because we believe that all children need to see themselves in books. The CLPE Reflecting Realities reports are proof that this isn’t yet as easy as we might think, but we have done our best.
Most of all, we wanted to showcase the very best stories we could find.
The booklist can be downloaded below. We hope that you will enjoy using it.
Children for Change Writing Competition
This competition has now closed. Winners will be announced on 9th May.