This year celebrates the writer Jānis Baltvilks' 80th birthday, honoring the most outstanding authors and artists of children's and young adult literature whose works have been published between May 2023 and May 2024.
The Jānis Baltvilks Prize for Literature was awarded to Inese Zandere for her three books that came out in 2023 – "Putni mūs redz/The Birds See Us","Izdomā sev auto/Imagine a Car", "Neredzamie plāksterīši/The Invisible Band-aids".
The prize for the Best Children's Book Illustrator was awarded to Aleksandra Runde, and the Children's Debut Award was awarded to Rute Marta Jansone.
The international winner of the Jānis Baltvilks Prize 2024 is the British writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave for her novel "Julia and the Shark" and its translator Renāte Punka.
In cooperation with the portal "LSM.lv" everyone had the opportunity to support their favorite author or artist among the Jānis Baltvilks Award nominees and take part in the readers' vote. Readers voted Laura Jambuševa's book "Diena, kuru es pārvērtu/The Day I Changed" as their favorite.
The Jānis Baltvilks prize has been awarded every year on July 24, the writer's birthday, since 2005. Since 2008, Jānis Baltvilks Prize has been an international children’s literature award for the Baltic Sea countries and is awarded in Riga to a foreign writer and the translator of their work into Latvian.
