For the past 29 years, Daekyo Culture Foundation has sponsored the event to discover and celebrate aspiring authors and to nurture children's creativity. Tens of thousands of applications from 14 countries registered for this year's event. Among them, only six are the global winners.

The global winners are from two categories: Illustrated Writing and Writing. First round picks for global were handpicked by judges from each respective country and only 154 made the cut. The candidates from Australia, Canada, mainland China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, the United States, and the United Kingdom were all competing to be the 2021 global winners of the Literary Award. 

This year's Illustrated Writing's Grand, Gold, and Silver prizes go to Anna Bian (mainland China), Shriya Madhavan (U.S.A), and Lauren Lam (U.K), respectively. Their illustrations about "the world in 10 years" are a "…phenomenal take of children's worldview and current events we face today," according to one of the global judges. For the Writing category, Rhythm Ghai (India), Otressa Lynielle Ong (Indonesia), and Wendell Seann Tiu (Philippines) received the Grand, Gold, and Silver prizes, respectively. The winners composed unique pieces about their "proudest achievement" in the form of narrative writing. "The narrative writing format requires a lot of planning and empathy from the author. This year's winners were able to express their experiences in vivid detail for the reader so that we could visualize the stories," noted the judges. All global winners receive a cash prize.