Cooling Wins Eleanor Farjeon Award: Bookstart Her Masterpiece of Altruism

Wendy Cooling has won the U K’s Eleanor Farjeon Award for distinguished contributions to children’s literature. Cooling’s achievements over a lifetime of involvement with children’s books include a stint as the head of the Children’s Book Foundation, but the inspiration for her masterpiece came in 1992, when she realized that when parents shared books with the very young, they later did better in school. Bookstart began life as a small pilot project, and became a national asset in 2004 when Chancellor Gordon Brown announced funding to extend the scheme to enable provision of free books to all children.