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The British Book Awards 2025 winners for Indie Bookshop, Small Press and Library of the Year named
The winners of The British Book Awards 2025 for Independent Bookshop of the Year, Small Press of the Year and Library of the Year were revealed tonight (12th May) in London. This year’s coveted Independent Bookshop of the Year award went to The Heath Bookshop while Small Press of the Year went to Sweet Cherry. 2025 also saw the revival of the Library of the Year prize, which was awarded to Manchester Libraries.
The overall winner of Independent Bookshop of the Year, sponsored by Gardners, was The Heath Bookshop, in King’s Heath, Birmingham. Despite only opening its doors in September 2022, the bookshop fought off competition from eight other regional and country winners selected from a list of 72 finalists from across the UK and Ireland.
Tom Tivnan, The Bookseller managing editor and chair of the Independent Bookshop of the Year judges, said: “In many ways, the triumph of The Heath Bookshop is a microcosm of the vibrancy of modern independent bookselling. The two owners, Catherine Gale and Claire Dawes, were book industry outsiders who brought entrepreneurship and innovation, taking a scant couple of years to build their business into a thriving community hub. There is a great Sliding Doors backstory – the two happened to meet by chance at a Booksellers Association Introduction to Bookselling training course – but they arrived on the scene with the confidence to take big swings, like launching a book festival in The Heath’s second year of trading, but have never stinted on the nitty-gritty of customer service and stock curation. The Heath is a truly worthy winner.”
This year saw the first edition of the Library of the Year award in eight years, which was awarded to Manchester Libraries. It wins for its multi-strand Blue Peter Book Club Live programme, which made “superb” use of the revered Blue Peter brand to bring children and families into contact with libraries and reading.
The programme engaged with people who had never or very rarely visited a library, resulting in an 88% visitor increase compared to a typical Saturday, with 60% of these attendees living in an area of high deprivation. Connecting with readers via local schools, the incentive saw children’s library membership increase by 33% during the campaign compared to the same period in 2023, and 12,308 people become new library members during the campaign period. A programme which spread across the city, the team created a badge trail to connect 13 cultural venues, distributed 20,000 trail maps and enlisted local partners to act as champions.
“The engagement levels were phenomenal,” said the judges. “It’s a really committed team who saw the opportunity to work with Blue Peter and ran with it. They grabbed the attention of children and young people who had never been into that library and kept hold of them afterwards.”
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Karen Napier MBE, chief executive officer at The Reading Agency, said: “Congratulations to Manchester Libraries for winning with their city-wide Blue Peter project. The project drove a huge number of children from areas of high deprivation to the library, and many for the first time, opening the doors to so much opportunity and the 33% increase in children’s library membership is a remarkable achievement. I do also want to acknowledge every library service that submitted to the award this year, which demonstrated the innovation at the heart of the sector. Libraries are lighthouses for the future, and spaces where knowledge is curated, truth is protected and communities are strengthened. They are powerful community hubs, places where everyone is equally rich in access to ideas, creativity and where the transformative power of reading connects us to worlds beyond our own.”
Small Press of the Year was awarded to Leicester-based children’s publisher, Sweet Cherry Publishing. The Midlands winner competed against nine other regional and country winners, which were selected from an extensive list of 46 finalists from across the UK and Ireland.
Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller and chair of judges, added: “This year’s winner – from a tough group – combines the best of independent book publishing with the start-up fire of a small business. Sweet Cherry’s inclusive approach speaks to many communities, while its fast pace and innovative approach is genuinely agenda setting. Once again, the Small Press award brings us an early view of what tomorrow’s publishing business will look like.”
