Mary Vaughan Jones was one of the main benefactors of children’s literature in Wales for a period of over thirty years. She was an infants teacher for eighteen years, five of which were spent at the first official Welsh-language school, and then a lecturer in infant method in a Teachers’ Training College. In her later years she was crippled with arthritis and mainly confined to her home, but she continued to write for younger children right up to her death in early 1983. She wrote nearly forty books for children, one of the most popular being Sali Mali, her first book in a learning-to-read series for younger children. Thousands of children whose native language or second language is Welsh will have learned to read with Sali Mali.

She also created the reading series Cyfres Dau Dau, a series of eight grades with a large and smaller book in each grade with the odd supplementary book of rhymes or simple plays based on the same characters. She also undertook translation work, her best perhaps being the Welsh version of Tamasin Cole’s Fourteen Rats and a Rat Catcher and Pat Hutchins’s Rosie’s Walk.

The award is a tribute to Mary Vaughan Jones for her outstanding contribution to children’s books in the Welsh language. The award is available for presentation every three years to a person who has made an outstanding contribution to children’s literature in the Welsh Language over a considerable period of time. The award is in the form of a silver trophy decipting characters from Mary Vaughan Jones’s books.

1985 Ifor Owen

1988 Emily Huws

1991 T Llew Jones

1994 W J Jones

1997 Roger Boore

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