serpa international award for picturebooks
The Serpa Award is open to picture book projects that present an original concept and/or narrative!
Picture books are understood to mean works with images and text or just images. Proposals that contain only text will not be accepted, but proposals without any written text (also known as silent books) will be considered valid.
Picture book submissions need not be exclusively aimed at children and/or young adults, but they must not exclude this readership. Proposals with the potential to capture a broader audience through their approach and richness will be especially valued.
Submissions will be accepted from authors and illustrators aged 18 or above, of any nationality, with or without published work. Employees of the organizing entities are not eligible to enter. Participants may submit any number of works.
Entries may be submitted by one or more authors, individually or in teams, but each text can only be entered once, meaning that a given text cannot be entered more than once, even if accompanied by different illustrations.
A single cash prize of €4,000 will be awarded to the winning submission. Of this total, €1,500 corresponds to an advance on copyright for the publication of the first edition of the work in Portugal by the publisher Planeta Tangerina, which will sign a publication contract(s) with the winning author(s).
The award therefore includes the publication of the book in Portuguese by the same publisher, which may also negotiate its sale to other languages and countries. Any subsequent editions (in Portuguese or in other languages) will be governed by the above-mentioned contract and its terms of payment.
Entrants should submit only one file per project, in PDF format.
This PDF should consist of a mock-up of the project, including the front cover.
The mock-up should include the whole text in paginated form and a minimum of three fully-illustrated double-page spreads*.
The remaining pages should be presented in draft form, in black and white, or in colour.
The PDF file should be formatted in double-page spreads and should not exceed 10 MB.
