Congratulations! What does it mean to you to win the Children’s Wainwright Prize for Fiction?
I am absolutely dumbfounded. I hadn’t prepared anything to say. I just came because it’s such an honour to be invited, because this Prize is such an amazing prize and it has such stature.
To be here with my shortlisted authors and meet them, and meet people who are on the same page trying to tell the same kinds of stories, but in our own unique way, is really special.
For anyone who hasn’t picked up your book yet, how would you describe The Danger of Small Things?
The Danger of Small Things is set in the near future, in a dystopian world where all of the bees have died out. Young girls are taken from home at a young age and have to live in camps where they learn to pollinate crops by hand.
Jess has been kept home by her mum and taught to read and to paint. With the brush that she’s given in the camp, she does something extraordinary: she paints a mural on a wall and begins to spark a revolution.
Your story imagines a world without honeybees, where art, freedom and individuality are all under threat. What inspired you to explore those themes for young readers?
I think it’s really important for young readers to feel empowered, because so much is put upon their shoulders and it’s quite heavy. But what dystopia can do is give them a world where they can explore those dark feelings safely.
It’s a book for anyone aged 12 and up, and I did that deliberately because I wanted it to be accessible to younger young adults as well.
I think giving them a language, showing them that we’re here for them, that it’s really important that we listen to them, that they create, that they make art, that they write, that they protest, that they act – they want to do these things. They are engaged. It’s just that they need encouragement and they need to be taken seriously.
And I particularly wanted young girls to know how important their voice is in protecting the environment and moving forward.
Jess discovers that creativity and small acts of resistance can be really powerful. What do you hope young readers will take away from her story?
I hope young readers feel inspired by hope. I hope they know that we’re listening to their voice. I hope they have courage, because they’re going to need courage. We all need courage to face the problems we have with the environment.
But all it takes is a little spark, a little bit of art, a little conversation. These are all small actions, but if we all take them, they have this massive cumulative effect, and we can all do that.
So I hope they just go out and do one thing. That’s all it takes. And they can see then that they do have the power; they have the voice. They just have to use it.
The book has been described as a love letter to your daughter. How did that personal connection and your experience of motherhood shape the writing?
I wrote it for my daughter, Gwenno, and she’s a teenager now, so she’s coming into the world, into her womanhood. I wanted her to feel supported.
It is a love letter because life is wonderful, nature is beautiful, and I wanted her to feel the wonder of it and the potential of it, and to grasp any potential that she has.
I remember thinking, maybe it won’t sell, maybe it isn’t what is selling at the moment. But I had to write it. It just wouldn’t leave me alone. And I wanted to write it for her, even if she was the only one who ever read it. It was that important to me.
Caryl Lewis’s The Danger of Small Things was awarded the 2026 Children’s Wainwright Prize for Fiction at the winners’ ceremony at Elmley Nature Reserve. The judges highlighted its imagined world without bees and its connection to the real-world decline in bee populations.