If you have watched a bright child stare at a page while the letters seem to twist and slide, you know how early a young reader starts to decide whether words are for them. A new picture book turns that exact feeling into art, and this week it earned one of the highest honors in children’s publishing. On June 23, illustrator Kate Rolfe won the 2026 Carnegie Medal for Illustration for Wiggling Words, a book drawn from her own experience of reading with dyslexia. The win puts a story about a struggling reader, and the creativity that struggle unlocks, in front of families and libraries around the world.
Illustrator Kate Rolfe has won the 2026 Carnegie Medal for Illustration for Wiggling Words, a picture book about reading with dyslexia. Here is what happened and what it means for families of struggling readers.
Common questions
What is Wiggling Words about?
What award did it win?
My child struggles to read. Does that mean dyslexia?
How do books like this help a struggling reader?
A picture book about reading with dyslexia won the 2026 Carnegie Medal for Illustration. Kate Rolfe turned her own struggle with letters into a celebration of how differently wired brains read.
What happened
The Carnegies, the United Kingdom’s longest-running book awards for children and young people, named their 2026 winners in a livestreamed ceremony on June 23. The illustration medal went to Kate Rolfe for Wiggling Words, published by Two Hoots. The awards are judged by librarians, and the illustration prize carries a specially commissioned medal and a 5,000-pound Colin Mears cash award.
Rolfe drew the book from her own life. She is dyslexic, autistic, and has ADHD, and she has described masking her struggles at school, where her differences went unrecognized. Wiggling Words follows a young character through a jumble of letters that twist into monsters and mountains, then settle into ordered, creative shapes, a journey the judges praised as a celebration of creativity and the universal experience of learning to read.
It is not her first nod from the prize. Rolfe was shortlisted in 2025 for her debut, Wolf and Bear, and Wiggling Words has also won the V&A Student Illustrator of the Year award and a World Illustration Award for new talent.
All my books are based on my personal experience of life being neurodivergent. But I’ve found that having a brain that works a bit differently is something to be celebrated.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
Why it matters for families
For a parent whose child believes they are bad at reading, a celebrated book that frames a different kind of reading brain as a source of creativity does real work. It hands a struggling reader a mirror that says the difficulty is part of a story, not the end of one. Rolfe has been open that the same wiring she once hid now feeds her art.
“I love the creative element that dyslexia brings to me,” she told Great British Life. “Similar words flow together, and that has been really helpful in my songwriting too. I’m quite poetic and expressive in my language, and I think that is a dyslexic trait.”
That framing matters because how a child sees themselves as a reader shapes whether they keep trying. Reading leans on several systems working together, including sound processing, visual tracking, and working memory, and a child who reads differently is building those skills, not carrying a fixed trait.
Key takeaways
- Top honor: Kate Rolfe won the 2026 Carnegie Medal for Illustration for Wiggling Words on June 23.
- Drawn from life: The book turns Rolfe's own experience of reading with dyslexia into a celebration of creativity.
- Why it lands: A librarian-judged medal puts a warm, capability-first reading story onto shelves worldwide.
What it means
Awards like this one shift which stories reach classroom shelves. A medal judged by librarians tends to land books in libraries, and a picture book that treats reading differences with warmth gives teachers and parents a gentle way to open the subject with a young child.
The deeper takeaway sits underneath the headlines. Rolfe’s success is a reminder that the goal was never to fix a child into reading the average way. It is to build the skills that make words click while protecting the belief that the child is capable. Read Wiggling Words with a struggling reader, and the message lands without a lecture: your brain works, and it works in interesting ways.
A child who reads differently is not a problem to be corrected; they are a reader being built, one skill at a time. The villain in this story was never the child and never the parent. It is a system quick to hang a label and slow to develop the brain behind it, the same instinct Rolfe spent years hiding from. If your child is fighting with reading, the Learning Success All Access program turns that struggle into steady, capability-first practice, with a free trial and a personalized Action Plan you keep either way.
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Your school district must evaluate your child free of charge if you ask in writing, whatever your income and whatever the outcome (US, 34 CFR 300.111 and 300.301(b)). That route takes time and answers a different question than you do. This one starts today, from what you already know.
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References
- File 770 — 2026 Carnegie Medalists for Children's Writing and Illustration
- Great British Life — Suffolk children's author Kate Rolfe on telling her story
