Best New Science Books for Children: Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize 2025

You are the Chair of the 2025 Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize judging panel. What were you and your fellow judges looking for in selecting the best new science books for kids?

This is a science prize, so we were looking for some really interesting science content — good text but also effective illustrations. You want it to be really engaging, to pull young people in and make them ask more questions, make them want to think further and look further. We’ve got so many distractions in the palm of our hand, especially once kids get smartphones, so we really wanted things that make them look up at the world around them and awaken that sense of exploration.

A strong theme through all the books that we’ve shortlisted is showing young readers how things fit into a system, because a lot of what we do as scientists is to systematise knowledge, to organise it in different ways.

Can you tell me briefly about your own work, and the background of the rest of the judging panel?

I am a volcanologist, but I’m actually a chemist by training. I work on volcanoes now and I have done since my PhD, but when I was a youngster I was drawn into science by astronomy and fascination with stars and planets. When I was eight years old I wanted to be an astronaut, but I had had an ear operation and somebody told me that they would never let me be an astronaut with scarred eardrums. So that was that dream shattered, but I could still see many possibilities with gazing out at the night sky from Earth and trying to understand, and then I got really inspired by science and maths at school — in no small part due to some very talented (and patient!) teachers.

We had a wonderfully diverse range of voices around the table. We had Helen Cooper, who is a children’s illustrator and author. She’s got an incredibly keen sense of how illustrations and text can work really well together, and some of the insights she gave us in terms of the way to look at a page were fascinating. We had Betina Ip, who is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin research fellow and a visual neuroscientist. She has written an illustrated popular science books herself in response to questions from her young daughter, so she’s got a very circumspect way of thinking about science communication, particularly for children. Her background in neuroscience was really interesting as well, because it brought a very different slant. And then we had Steve Brusatte, who is a dinosaur expert and author who has also advised Hollywood on some of their dinosaur films. And then, really importantly, we had Vicky Walsh, who is a primary school teacher and science lead. She brought beautiful insights on what appeals to children.

I think what’s amazing about this prize is that about 600 schools, youth groups, and reading clubs will read the shortlist, and it’s their votes that count. Our job was to provide them with a diverse range of the best recent books to take a look at, and then it’s up to them.

I really like that about this award — the shortlisting process ensures that the books are scientifically accurate, but the judges who select the winning book are kids.

It means we could take a bit of a risk with some of the books, because the final award will have their total seal of approval.

Let’s move on to the first book we are discussing, Green: The Story of Plant Life on Our Planet, by Nicola Davies, a zoologist and prolific children’s author, and Emily Sutton. They have collaborated on many picture books that help children understand our planet in various ways. Of the six books on the shortlist, this is the one for the youngest readers. Can you introduce it?

The first thing to say about it is that the illustrations are beautiful. It’s got a very strong visual language, which is something that we really liked as a panel. It starts off with a lovely image of a tree, which children living in most places can relate to — whether they see trees in urban parks or wide spaces of countryside. But then — and you don’t have to engage with all the details — it has a cross-section of a tree, with arrows, inputs and outputs, and a root system.

This is very scientific, the idea of a diagram that takes us from something we can see to things we can’t see, and how the things that we can’t see fit together. We can’t see the root system of the tree, we can’t see the energy flowing through the tree, or the gases going in and out. But if we study the tree, we can start to see those things or imagine that we see those things, and we can draw pictures to draw our understanding together. It’s not about expecting six-year-olds to draw pictures like that, but it’s getting the idea across that you can go from something you can see to fitting it into the world beyond that.

The visual language of science can be beautiful. I was particularly drawn to a picture of a cross-section of a leaf. It is visually fun, but actually it’s very similar to the sorts of diagrams that you get in a biology textbook. You don’t have to understand it all at this stage, but it means that when children come across these things later, that language of science will be less alien to them. That’s something we really liked as a panel.

The book goes on to food webs, and the history of our green planet. As an Earth scientist, there is an image that I find wonderful, showing the transition of the early magma- and rock-dominated planet of greys and blacks and browns into our green planet as plants spread across its landforms, which is what makes us distinctive in the solar system and beyond. There are the oceans teeming with life, and then we get into fossil fuels and cityscapes, and some quite difficult things about how much carbon we’ve released, but it ends back with the tree. So it goes full circle and brings the children back to something familiar, although it’s taken them on quite a journey.

There are lots of things to discuss when reading this book to children. Lots of the images have great things to point to and talk about, for example the different fish in the ocean, some of which are familiar and some of which really are not. There’s a great phytoplankton page, and I could imagine sitting and talking about all the different shapes, and again it’s the unseeable; you can’t see phytoplankton with the naked eye but it’s the idea that if we look at seawater with a microscope there are all these bugs that do magic things. The book takes us through how Earth has evolved and how ecosystems are developed, in beautiful, rich illustrations.

Next up is Patience… by Rachel Williams and Leonie Lord. Why did the judging panel select this one for the shortlist?

We were all quite enchanted by it. I found a lovely thread of calm. It was very interesting as a science book, to have something that is about the fact that things take different time, and being mindful of what’s happening all around us at different time scales. There’s a message about stopping to think about what’s happening, which really appealed to us. Vicky felt it was a really good book for teachers, in that there are lots of different activities you could build around this book.

The premise of the book is to take the reader from things that happen in a minute, to things that happen in eight minutes, in a night, in two weeks, and so on to up to over a hundred years. It picks out quite a diversity of science themes, and each one is treated in a very nice and informative fashion. In a minute, your heart beats 60-100 times. The book starts with this, and I can see a first activity being to get children to see how many times their heart beats in a minute, then do some exercise and see that their heart beats faster. You can feel that it does, but you can also take measurements of that. So it starts with something that is really quite tangible, something that young people can experience themselves, but then on the next page you’ve got a picture of what the heart looks like, and the blood going in, the blood going out. It starts with the familiar and then goes that step deeper, which is what science is very often about.

We loved the visual style. I particularly liked the beautiful structure of the coral reef, which is very pertinent with coral reef bleaching. In 25 years, a coral reef starts to form, and the images tell the tale of how a reef forms and is a living thing. The science is threaded through this book rather than in the reader’s face, and this felt original — almost a way of thinking about the world rather than a syllabus in any way to work through.

The next shortlisted science books for kids is The Wild Life of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals by Mike Barfield and Paula Bossio, an award-winning author-illustrator team. So it’s not just about dinosaurs — there are also killer shrimps and walking whales, and some ancient species that are still with us today.

There are a lot of dinosaur books out there for kids, for good reasons. They’re very inspiring and fascinating for young readers. But what we really liked with this book is that it sets the dinosaurs in a much broader context. There are plenty of dinosaurs in here, but the book covers all of prehistoric life. You can dip in and find the bits on dinosaurs you want, but it also gives an appreciation that ancient life is much more than that.

I really enjoyed that there were some quite wacky things in here. “What has five eyes, no legs and a trunk?” You sort of think of a very unusual elephant, but it’s an opabinia, a really weird creature that we’ve got fossil records for from the Cambrian period and we get to marvel at several other of the wacky body plans that life tried out during the Cambrian explosion, too, which is something I only learned about as a graduate student. The cartoon style works really well. It makes it fun, makes it approachable, and has a sense of time in it as well.

Yes, it’s a joy to get immersed in this book. It’s humorous and richly illustrated, a bit like a graphic novel. But it’s also quite scientific, with a timeline and a glossary, so children can get familiar with that kind of nonfiction reading.

I was a bit nervous that Steve, who is a dinosaur expert, would find stuff wrong in this book, being such an expert, but he loved this book as well — he was really enthusiastic about it.

That’s a great stamp of approval. Are you a bit envious of the books for kids that are available these days, compared to what we had?

Yes, I think maybe that’s coming across a bit.

Shall we move on to The Animal Body Book? It’s by Jess French, who is a vet, television presenter and award-winning author of children’s books about animals and the planet, and Jonathan Woodward, an award-winning wildlife illustrator. Can you introduce it?

The veterinary knowledge really came through. There are lots of books about animals in children’s literature, because children love animals. What we really liked about this book is that it’s a proper book on anatomy, and not just human anatomy, it’s much broader. We felt this is a really a great book for pulling kids in, because they want to learn about animals, but actually it lays out a whole system explaining lots about the different ways that we study anatomy. It’s a really rich book, and I learnt a lot by looking at it. It has great visuals, with wonderful double pages that make you want to read more. We thought the combination of drawings and photos works really well.

In terms of its organisation, it’s about different body shapes and how we characterise them, different organ systems, and how they fit together. There’s a section on skeletons, and then information about all the different sorts of skeleton types with examples. One of the pages I really love is on hands. It starts with thinking about our human hand, the best on the planet at grasping and using tools. But across the animal kingdom, there are many different appendages that have evolved, from paws to flippers, and each is perfectly suited for a specific lifestyle. I liked the way that this led me to look at something as familiar as my own hands more like a scientist and think about what they’re good at, and what the other types are good at. It’s a really nice way of systematising thinking about the variety that we see in the animal kingdom, looking at your own body, but also bodies much more broadly — both on the outside and the inside.

The next book on the 2025 shortlist is The Rocks Book by Nancy Dickmann, who has written many nonfiction books for kids. Is it close to your volcanologist heart?

This is the sort of book I would have loved as a child. It’s massively visual, and packed with things you can flick through and read more about. The other thing I would have loved is looking at the maps and the amazing photos of landscapes.

Yes, it’s very visually attractive, with photos of stunning rock formations around the world, and minerals and gemstones that look almost edible.

Yes, exactly. You have all these different, amazing places, which will awaken children’s sense of exploration of the world around them. But there is also plenty of background stuff about how we study rocks, the systems we use, and planetary-scale theories like plate tectonics.

It’s an introduction to geology and how fossils form.

Yes, and the different layers of the Earth. Any book that has Inge Lehmann mentioned in it is onto a winner with me, she was such a pioneer and did such an interesting piece of work about the inner core and the outer core but often gets overlooked.

Another thing that the panel found really positive is that it has a section on how children can study rocks themselves. It’s not just about the world as big and wide and amazing; it’s also about going to your local park or to your back garden if you have one, and thinking about the things to look for, the places you might go. And it tells them about how to do this safely as well, which is really important. There’s a whole page on where to look for rocks, but also a reminder to ask whether it’s safe and legal. This book has an immensely wide scope, but it also brings you back to the local, opening young readers up to seeing new things in the landscape around them, and giving them a good excuse to get out and about. Again, I can see some great teaching activities around this one.

We have come to the final book on this year’s Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize shortlist, The History of Information by Chris Haughton, a designer and award-winning children’s book author.

This is the most grown up of the books. I think it’s something that adults will get a lot out of, as well young people. The premise of the book is that what sets humankind apart is not that we’re more intelligent than the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s our ability to accumulate and share information, including in an intergenerational sense. We don’t have to relearn everything from one generation to the next and we have repositories of knowledge where learning comes together.

We’re in the age of information, information is at the heart of everything that we do these days, we’re bombarded with it. The book is organised under different themes: language, drawing, writing, printing, science, news, networks, broadcast, computers, and it even has a section on the history of disinformation, which is such a current topic and such an important topic for young people in particular. The coverage is very big — we’ve got computer science, communication science, cosmology, military science, music — and that’s very interesting because it shows the underpinning nature of technology.

It’s a very different book to the others on the shortlist, and it’s fascinating. It’s a novel way of approaching thinking and what has made us who we are today.

After reading all the science books for children that were submitted for the award, and seeing what is getting published, do you feel that there are any fields of science that are underrepresented in children’s books? And are there plenty of books out there that achieve what the Royal Society aims to do with this prize?

Yes, we had a very rich longlist, 42 books down from over 90 that were submitted. There are definitely areas that are more represented than others. There’s an element of market economics in that certain things sell better, and publishers need to go with that. When we did the shortlist, we tried to find books that either did things a bit differently — like The History of Information — or that took something more familiar, like dinosaurs and animals, but took a different viewpoint on them. Not every area of science is getting equal playtime in terms of children’s books, but I was really inspired by the submissions that we had.

Do you have anything to add about your experience of being on the judging panel for this excellent science book award for children?

I learnt loads from the other judges, and I think I’ll learn even more when we get the verdict back from our young readers. I’ve actually been writing a children’s book about volcanoes with Daniel Long as the illustrator. I’ve written for adults before, but it’s so different when you bring the combination of illustrations and text together. It’s really powerful when these threads come together, and that’s very different to adult science writing where you may have some illustrations, but they generally sit apart from the text itself, rather than being woven together with equal importance. It has fascinated me to think about how those two elements of scientific storytelling work together to best effect, and I think that when this synergy makes the science leap out of the page, it is part of what the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize is all about.