February 2023: What’s New With Owlkids?

It’s time for our monthly Owlkids Books recap!

First up, some February award and review news:

• How to Party Like a Snail is a Heather’s Pick at Indigo!
• Beautiful You, Beautiful Me is an Ontario Library Association Top 10 Best Bet.
• Four of our books were selected as TD Summer Reading Club Top Recommended Reads for 2023: I Sang You Down from the Stars, The Sour Cherry Tree, The Deepest Dig, and The Weird Sisters: A Note, a Goat, and a Casserole.
• Corner received another starred review, this time from Kirkus! This follows the book’s first star from Publishers Weekly last month. Kirkus called the book “a quirky, thought-provoking, and stunning reminder that a house is not a home.”

We’re also excited to share this video interview we did with What to Bring author Lorna Schultz Nicholson and illustrator Ellen Rooney. This sensitive look at natural disasters through the eyes of a child follows a little girl and her family as they evacuate their home due to a wildfire. The book draws on the experiences of the creators, who both live in areas prone to wildfires. Find out more about Lorna’s inspiration for the book below:

In addition to this video resource, we’ve also developed free downloadable resources for most of our spring titles. This includes:

• • A discussion and activity guide for Otis & Peanut.
  • A discussion guide and poster for Biindigen! Amik Says Welcome.
  • A discussion and activity guide for A Star Explodes.
  • A discussion guide for Dounia and the Magic Seeds.
  • A discussion and activity guide for How to Be Human.

We are still working on a discussion and activity guide for Becoming Bionic, and a discussion guide for What to Bring.

And the rights team has two big updates to share this month!

• First, we are delighted to say that we’ve been shortlisted for the 2023 BOP — Bologna Prize for the Best Children’s Publishers of the Year in North America! The prize is awarded annually to publishers “at the forefront of innovation in their activity for the creative nature of the editorial choices they have made during the previous year.” This is our second year in a row being shortlisted for this award and we are so happy to be nominated for North America alongside four other fantastic publishers. The winners for each category of the award will be announced during the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, which is happening next week from March 6th to 9th! We are wishing our team good luck at the fair as they head off to Italy in the next few days.

• We are also excited to share our brand-new Spring 2023 Rights Catalog with you, which we recently sent out to all of our foreign rights partners! You can take a look through our new catalog, featuring sneak peaks at many of our titles to come in Fall 2023 and Spring 2024, here.