Welcome to the Excelsior Award


What is the Excelsior Award?

The Excelsior Award is the only fully independent, nationwide book award for graphic novels and manga - where kids aged 9-18 decide the winner (via four age-appropriate categories) by rating each book as they read it! The award now regularly attracts over two hundred schools from all over the UK and Ireland. 

For 2026, twenty graphic novels/manga will be selected for the four age-appropriate shortlists. The overall goal of this scheme is to encourage reading amongst teenagers. However, its secondary target is to raise the profile of graphic novels and manga amongst school librarians and teachers. This storytelling medium has been a largely underused resource within education for many years. The Excelsior Award attempts to highlight some of the amazing books that are out there - books that fully deserve to be in our school libraries alongside regular fiction!


Winner 2025

Lord of the Flies (published by Faber & Faber) is the overall winner of the Excelsior Award 2025, as chosen by the students of the UK. Although quite a thick graphic novel (over 350 pages!), published in a hardback format, and an adaptation of a novel originally written in 1954, Lord of the Flies just goes to show how the teenagers of the UK should never be underestimated when it comes to being able to appreciate beauty and quality in their graphic novels. Thank you to all the schools that took part this year!