Bath Children’s Novel Award 2019 Shortlist

The Bath Children’s Novel Award  2019 is an international prize for emerging novelists writing for children or young adults. Since December, a team of Junior Judges aged seven to seventeen years have been reading and reporting back on each longlisted manuscript. We are delighted to reveal the titles and premises for their favourite five:

 

REEF
A sea boy with nothing to lose goes above ground to save his war torn world and finds a girl up for changing people’s views.
1666
A teenage illusionist is trapped in her cellar with a fresh corpse as the Great Fire of London rages outside.
STARGAP
A Queensland boy and his friends must solve wildlife clues in a fierce race to save a rainforest reserve.
THE GHOSTS OF REGENTS TERRACE
Edinburgh maid and aspiring photographer Lottie must capture evidence of a ghostly fraud to expose the truth and save her friends.
THE SKY OVER REBECCA
When mysterious, inexplicable prints appear in the snow in Stockholm, Kara must discover where, or rather who, they’re coming from.

 

As all our judges read “blind” we’ll be keeping the authors’ identities under wraps until 2019’s £2,500 winning novel has been chosen by Lauren Gardner of Bell Lomax Moreton literary agency. The winner will be announced by Lauren at a reception in Bath’s Museum of Architecture on 13th February 2020. One longlisted writer will also receive a place, worth £1,800, on Edit your Novel the Professional Way from Cornerstones Literary Consultancy. 

The Bath Novel Award 2020 invites submissions from emerging novelists writing for adults.

Judge: Jenny Savill of international literary agency Andrew Nurnberg Associates

Prize: £3,000 prize. Closing date: 31st May 2020, full details here