We are delighted to announce the shortlist for the Bath Children’s Novel Award 2020.

The Bath Children’s Novel Award is an international prize for emerging novelists writing for children or young adults. Since December 2020 a team of Junior Judges aged seven to seventeen have been reading the full manuscripts of the 22 longlisted books and we are thrilled to reveal the titles of their favourite four.

The cast of this year’s shortlist include: a C22nd girl on the run in a snowy Orwellian world; hilariously naughty twin boys who sell their mum on eBay; an artistic Italian girl who becomes a spy in wartime Oxford; a teenage agoraphobe whose mum vanishes from the basement of their block of flats.

This year’s £3,000 winning manuscript will be judged by literary agent Stephanie Thwaites of Curtis Brown. Shortlistees receive manuscript feedback from the Junior Judges and one longlisted writer will win an online place worth £1,800 on Edit your Novel the Professional Way from Cornerstones Literary Consultancy.

As the prize is judged “blind” we will reveal the writers’ names when the winner is announced announced online on 11th February 2021. In the meantime, many congratulations to the writers of this year’s final four:

NORTH STAR

ROBOMOM

THE ENEMY INSIDE

THE WORLD WITHIN

Submissions are now open for 2021’s adult fiction prize