Eric and Terry Fan

It’s been a good week for Terry and Eric Fan, Wesley King, and Simon & Schuster Canada. The Ontario Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Foundation today announced the winners of the 2017 Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Awards, with the Fan Brothers and King taking top prizes in their categories for two books published by S&S.

The Fan Brothers won the honour in the picture book category for The Night Gardener, which earlier this week garnered a Blue Spruce Award through the Ontario Library Association’s Forest of Reading program. King, meanwhile, captured the student voters’ hearts and minds to take the YA/MG category with his novel OCDaniel, about a boy with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which recently won the OLA’s Red Maple Fiction Award and the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award.

Wesley King

The Schwartz Awards, which are administered by the OAC and OAF, were founded in 1976 to honour excellence in Canadian children’s literature. The annual award, which comes with a cash prize of $6,000, is decided by the votes of student juries comprising Grade 3-4 and Grade 7-8 students, this year hailing from Frontenac Public School in Burlington, Ontario.