JACQUELINE Wilson is queen of children’s libraries: her books fill more than half the top 20 of most borrowed children’s titles.
The author of The Story of Tracy Beaker and Double Act is also the sixth most borrowed author overall. She has notched up more than a million loans over the past year - one of only 12 writers to do so.
Figures unveiled by the Public Lending Right, which pays authors for library loans, rank Ms Wilson as the children’s Catherine Cookson, overall most borrowed author.
While Ms Wilson is still catching up with RL “Goosebumps” Stine, his top children’s slot is largely due to his prodigious output.
Ms Wilson is patron of the libraries’ network of children’s reading groups, Chatterbooks.
JK Rowling is the only children’s author to break into the Most Borrowed Books top 10; her books fill the first five places in the children’s fiction top 20. Jacqueline Wilson novels then fill the next 12 places.
However, Wilson and Stine are the only children’s authors in the million-loans-plus band. Whitbread winner Philip Pullman, on 150,000 loans, has some way to go.
Authors are paid 2.67p per loan up to a maximum of pound;6,000. This week pound;4.5m is being shared between 17,581 authors. For the first time, European authors published in the UK can collect, benefiting Irish authors including Maeve Binchy whose Tara Road is the 10th most borrowed book.
TOP 10 MOST BORROWED AUTHORS*
1 Catherine Cookson 2 RL Stine (Goosebumps series) 3 Danielle Steel 4 Josephine Cox 5 Dick Francis 6 Jacqueline Wilson 7 Jack Higgins 8 Janet amp; Allan Ahlberg 9 Agatha Christie 10 Ruth Rendell * Million-plus loans each
TOP 10 MOST BORROWED CHILDREN’S AUTHORS
1 R L Stine (Goosebumps) 2 Jacqueline Wilson 3 Janet amp; Allan Ahlberg 4 Lucy Daniels (Animal Ark) 5 Roald Dahl 6 Mick Inkpen 7 Enid Blyton 8 Eric Hill (Spot books) 9 Dick King-Smith 10 Nick Butterworth
