The winner of the 2017 Kim Scott Walwyn Prize was tonight named as Alice Curry, founder and publisher of Lantana Press, at a prize ceremony that saw Mary Beard give a keynote speech on women in the modern and ancient world, at Carmelite House, London.

The driving force behind Lantana was praised as a great role model for future generations starting out in publishing by judges of the Kim Scott Walwyn Prize, which recognises the professional achievements and promise of women who have worked in publishing in the UK for up to seven years.

With a background in academia, lecturing in children’s literature, Curry set out on a mission when she set up Lantana Press as an independent house in 2014: to publish picture books with a greater equality of representation and to help facilitate a more global understanding of childhood. Given that in London, fifty-five in one hundred children identify as non-white British, yet only around five in one hundred children’s books published in the UK are written by authors of diverse cultural backgrounds about characters of colour, Curry also identified a potentially lucrative opportunity in this huge market gap.

Curry was drawn from an impressive shortlist, including Sarah Braybrooke, managing director at Scribe UK, and Candice Carty-Williams, senior marketing executive at Vintage Books and founder of the 4th Estate and Guardian BAME Short Story Prize. Amy Durant, publishing director at Endeavour Press, and co-publisher of Daunt Books Zeljka Marosevic, completed the line-up. The four shortlisted candidates receive a one-day training course courtesy of the PTC and a £25 book token courtesy of National Book Tokens.