Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2020

The winners have been announced!

Children's Sports Book of the Year Award

Unbelievable Football 

Congratulations to Matt Oldfield, author of the VERY popular Ultimate Football Heroes series, who has won the Children's Sports Book of the Year Award with his book 'Unbelievable Football The Most Incredible True Football Stories (You Never Knew)'. Definitely one for our shelves given the popularity of his Ultimate Football Heroes series!

Branford Boase 2020

The shortlist for the Branford Boase Award has a great selection of books.

If you are looking for a summer reading recommendation you could not do much better than this!

Louise Rennison National Funny Award

Another great competition to enter at a time when we could all do with a laugh!!

The Louise Rennison National Funny Award is aimed at 11-18 year olds across the United Kingdom, who don’t take themselves too seriously!

The competition is FREE to enter and falls into two categories:

- Comedic Writing (up to 1,000 words or three pages of creative copy – this could be a short story, a script, a screen play, a book chapter or an article for a magazine or newspaper).

- Comedic Performance (up to three minutes of video – this could be a scene for a film, a TV show, a play, an advert or a stand-up performance).

Submit your entries here by email.  The closing date for the competition is the 31st of August 2020.

Good luck!

Philip Pullman new 'His Dark Materials' novella

Many of our students have really enjoyed reading Philip Pullman's Northern Lights. 

Some studied it as a set text and clearly became very invested in Lyra's story.

Well ... we are sure they will be pleased to hear that Serpentine, a novella which follows Lyra Silvertongue as she returns to Trollesund to visit an old friend, will be released in October 2020.

You can read about it in this interesting piece in The Guardian. Serpentine will certainly be going on our wish list!

Help your school Library win £5000

Just two weeks left to vote for your school Library and help them win £5000 of book tokens!

Vote here

Closing date Friday 31 July.

Hen Harrier Day writing competition

Another great writing competition for young people.

Hen Harrier Action are inviting young people to submit a piece of creative writing relating to any British wildlife.  

There are three age categories, 5 - 8 years, 9- 12 years and 13 - 16 years (based on how old the writer is on the 8th of August 2020.)

Entries will be judged by the author Gill Lewis whose writing is very popular with many of our students.

Closing date for entries is midnight on Friday the 24th of July 2020. 

Young Walter Scott Prize

The Young Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is a fantastic creative writing competition.

If you are interested in history and writing this is the competition for you!

There are two entry categories, 11 - 15 and 16 - 19 and entrants must live in the UK.  The work must be at least 800 words and set in a time before you (as the writer) were born.  It can take many forms, a story, a diary, letters, poetry, drama or reportage.

The closing date is 31 October so plenty of time, but entries must be made by post so we are giving you lots of notice.  Details of the competition can be found here.  The entry form, which you will need to print and post, can be found here.