The Laugh Out Loud Book Awards 2025 – About the Lollies

About the Lollies

The Laugh Out Loud Book Awards (the Lollies) celebrates the best and funniest children’s books in the UK and Ireland, voted for by children. The Awards have been running since 2016 and now we’re back for our ninth year!

What are the Lollies?

If you love to laugh, you’ll love the Lollies! They’re a book award searching for the very funniest children’s books published in the previous year. For 2025, we’re looking for books published in 2023 in four different categories: Picture Books, Books for 6-8-year-olds, Books for 9-12-year-olds and Non-Fiction Books. Once the judges have decided on a shortlist, it’s all up to YOU! This is truly a children’s book award with the winner decided by children themselves.

How does it work?

Earlier this year, publishers could submit the funniest books that they published in 2023. We then sent all of these brilliant books to a panel of book industry experts so they could create a longlist of the top books, ready for our judges to read. Our judges then laughed their socks off with all the hilarious books on the Lollies longlist! Once they read them all, we invited them to decide on the final shortlist together. They picked their top four in each category, giving us our shortlist.

Then it’s your turn to decide! We will announce the shortlist very soon and open the vote, giving you four choices per category. Once all the votes are in, we will count them up and then announce the winners – all decided by you!

When does this happen?

The shortlisting happened in May 2025. Voting opens in July and will close in Autumn 2025. We’ll announce the winners in December 2025.

Get in touch

If you’d like to know more about the Lollies, tweet us @lolbookawards or email us at laughoutloud@scholastic.co.uk.