Mikey Please has been named overall winner of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2025 for his funny and immersive picture book The Café at the Edge of the Woods (HarperCollins Children’s Books), as voted for by Waterstones booksellers.
The prize is now in its 21st year, consists of £5,000 and “the promise of ongoing commitment to the winner’s writing and illustrating career”.
Before securing the overall win, The Café at the Edge of the Woods won in the Illustrated Books category, while Rune: The Tale of a Thousand Faces by Carlos Sánchez (Flying Eye Books) won in the Younger Readers category and King of Nothing by Nathanael Lessore (Hot Key Books) took the prize for the Older Readers category.
Bea Carvalho, head of books at Waterstones, said: “Mikey Please is an exciting new talent in both illustration and writing for children. The Café at the Edge of the Woods is a book which champions the fun and playful joy to be found in children’s books, takes delight in the delicious and disgusting in equal measure, and begs to be read on repeat. We can’t wait to share this exquisite picture book with children everywhere as the winner of Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2025, alongside our brilliant category winners, Rune and King of Nothing.”
Please, a BAFTA award-winning and Oscar-nominated animation director and writer based in Bristol, said: “The story grew from a game my wife, son, and I would play during lockdown. Jess would pretend (with little effort) to be a pompous chef, my son Axel would play the downtrodden waiter, and I (with even less effort) would pretend to be a demanding customer. The dynamic was so rich, the setting so loaded with potential and the opportunity to showcase my long-practised art of rearranging food to look funny made the story impossible to resist.”
