The Carnegies

Get the Carnegies digital collection on Sora

Free access for schools to the Carnegie 2026 Awards digital titles

The Sora team is thrilled to be one of the sponsors and the official digital partner for the Carnegie Awards 2026.

We will be working with publishers to provide the best possible access to digital versions of many of the books shortlisted for the Carnegie Awards at no cost to you. This will include access to all the available shortlisted books for The Carnegie Medal for Writing and the Carnegie Medal for Illustration.

If you are not already using Sora in your school

Sora will again be offering free access to a Carnegies Shadowing collection on Sora, the digital reading platform and app for students. This will include access to all the available shortlisted digital books for the Carnegie Medals. Following the completion of the Carnegie shadowing window, your access to Sora will remain indefinitely.

The collection also contains many of the books that were shortlisted for the 2025 awards. If you set up access to Sora for 2025, you do not need to take any action this year.

Simply complete the form below to get started with your free Sora access and visit the Carnegies site to sign up for Shadowing. If you have any questions, you can contact us via carnegies@overdrive.com

Existing Sora customers can contact their Account Manager to make the shortlisted books available for free.

Carnegie Medal Winners
2025 Carnegie Medal Award-Winners
Both titles were featured on Sora as part of the shadowing program. Photographed by Tom Pilston

Carnegie Program

Feedback from schools for the 2025 offer:

“Loved the accessibility for all students, I didn't have to worry about having enough copies of each book. We also loved the audio versions of some of the books. Sora was a godsend to us.”

“The digital offer was amazing - really helpful - especially the audio versions.”

“It’s fantastic! Wouldn’t change a thing about it. Great resource for our students. And the books can’t get destroyed.”

“It was absolutely fantastic to have this resource available! Really good quality, and genuinely free without strings.”

This offer is only available for schools in the United Kingdom

FAQs

No. There is no set-up fee and no hosting fee for Sora in your school and no charge to access the shortlisted books. You will also have free access to an administration portal (Advantage Account) to access data about how your students use Sora. This account gives you the option of purchasing extra digital content for your school, which will be hosted on the Carnegies Shadowing collection platform. However, this is entirely optional.

We hope so! Due to the nature of digital publishing and rights, we cannot guarantee this, but we will be using our status as digital partner and our existing excellent relationships with publishers to aim for all the shortlisted books being available for all users to access at the same time. We will be focusing our efforts on the titles shortlisted for the writing award but may also be able to include some of the titles shortlisted for the illustration award too.

As many as you want (and staff too!) You will be set up with access to our User Login Manager portal to upload usernames. It is your choice as to whether you include a small shadowing group or the whole school.

Not at this point, as we want to get you up and running asap without any hold-ups, and the User Login Manager portal is the simplest and quickest way to do this.

Yes – we will labelling the shortlisted books as either ‘Juvenile’ or ‘Young Adult’ according to the age guidance on the Carnegie shadowing site. (‘Juvenile’ to mean suitable for up to age 12, and ‘Young Adult’ for age 13+). You can then apply these labels to your users in the User Login Manager portal to control which books they can see. These can then be adjusted if you get parental permission for students to read the older books.

No – you will retain access to Sora and the Carnegies Shadowing digital collection for as long as you want at no charge (continued access to the shortlisted titles will depend on the agreements we reach with publishers). You can choose to just use it for shadowing the awards, but you also have the option of using it as a platform to introduce other digital content into your school and using your Advantage Account to purchase the titles you want. Please note that anything you purchase in this way will only be available to your school.

We will also set up the main contact in each school with demo access to one of our shared collections, Primary or Secondary Ebooks Now, for the duration of the shadowing period so that they can view options. If you decide that you would then like to subscribe to one of these collections, we will cancel your Carnegies Shadowing collection account, and transfer across any extra content you may have purchased.

If you subscribe to either Primary or Secondary Ebooks Now, the books will be added to these collections (age-appropriate books only for the Primary collection) and so you can access them through your normal Sora account. If you have your own Sora collection or are a member of any other shared collection, you can opt to ‘add a library’ and gain access to this free Carnegies collection. Your Account Manager will be in touch about this, or you can contact them to ask for more information.