Costa Book Awards 2013 Shortlists Announced

COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2013 SHORTLISTS ANNOUNCED

• Record number of entries to this year’s Awards (617) including the highest-ever number of entries in the Children’s Book Award category
• Three former Whitbread/Costa category winners feature in this year’s shortlists – Maggie O'Farrell, 2013 Forward Prize winner Michael Symmons Roberts and Kate Atkinson who went on to win the overall Book of the Year in 1995 - as well as three formerly shortlisted authors; Clive James, Robin Robertson and Sathnam Sanghera
• All-female Novel category shortlist includes a posthumous nomination for Bernardine Bishop, the youngest witness in the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960
• Five debut writers feature across the categories including two in Children's Book - former pig farmer and postman Ross Montgomery and Sarah Naughton - and Helen Mort in Poetry Biography category sees GP and author, Gavin Francis, pitched against writers Thomas Harding, Olivia Laing and Lucy Hughes-Hallett, who recently won the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize

19.30pm, Tuesday 26th November, London: Costa today announces the shortlists for the 2013 Costa Book Awards.

The Costa Book Awards is the only major UK book prize that is open solely to authors resident in the UK and Ireland and also, uniquely, recognises the most enjoyable books across five categories – First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book - published in the last year.

Originally established in 1971 by Whitbread Plc, Costa announced its takeover of the sponsorship of the UK's most prestigious book prize in 2006. 2013 marks the 42nd year of the Book Awards. This year’s Costa Book Awards attracted 617 entries – the highest number of entries ever received in one year. Judges on this year’s panels (three per category) included broadcaster and journalist Paul Ross; broadcaster and author Clemency Burton-Hill; poet and journalist Olivia Cole; author and former Channel 4 News culture editor, Matthew Cain, author, columnist and scriptwriter Emma Kennedy and writers, John Burnside, Anne de Courcy and Fanny Blake. Winners in the five categories, who each receive £5,000, will be announced on Monday 6th January 2014. The overall winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2013 will receive £30,000 and will be selected and announced at the Costa Book Awards ceremony in central London on Tuesday 28th January 2014. The winner of the Costa Short Story Award, voted for by the public, will also be announced at the ceremony. The shortlisted six stories for the Costa Short Story Award, now in its second year, will be revealed on the Costa Book Awards website, www.costabookawards.com, on Tuesday 3rd December. Since the introduction of the Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won eleven times by a novel, four times by a first novel, five times by a biography, seven times by a collection of poetry and once by a children’s book. The 2012 Costa Book of the Year was Bring Up the Bodies by novelist Hilary Mantel; the first book to have been named as Costa Book of the Year and won the Man Booker Prize in the same year.

To be eligible for the 2013 Costa Book Awards, books must have been first published in the UK or Ireland between 1 November 2012 and 31 October 2013 and their authors resident in the UK for the previous three years.

Full details of the shortlists follow.

For additional information please visit www.costabookawards.com.

For further press information, to request an interview with an author or book jacket or author images, please contact:

Amanda Johnson

Costa Book Awards Press and Publicity

Telephone: 07715 922 180 (mobile)

Email: amanda@amandajohnsonpr.com

Twitter: @CostaBookAwards

COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2013 SHORTLISTS

2013 Costa Novel Award shortlist

Kate Atkinson              Life After Life                                    Doubleday

Bernardine Bishop      Unexpected Lessons in Love          John Murray

Maggie O’Farrell         Instructions for a Heatwave            Tinder Press

Evie Wyld                   All the Birds, Singing                       Jonathan Cape

2013 Costa First Novel Award shortlist

Sam Byers                 Idiopathy Fourth                                 Estate

Kate Clanchy             Meeting the English                           Picador

Nathan Filer               The Shock of the Fall Harper           CollinsPublishers

Sathnam Sanghera   Marriage Material                               William Heinemann

2013 Costa Biography Award shortlist

Gavin Francis           Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins      Chatto & Windus

Thomas Harding      Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz                                                                                                            William Heinemann

Lucy Hughes-Hallett The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War                                                                                                                        Fourth Estate

Olivia Laing               The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink                   Canongate

2013 Costa Poetry Award shortlist

Clive James                          Dante, The Divine Comedy                                     Picador

Helen Mort                            Division Street                                                         Chatto & Windus

Robin Robertson                   Hill of Doors                                                            Picador

Michael Symmons Roberts   Drysalter                                                                 Jonathan Cape

2013 Costa Children’s Book Award shortlist

Ross Montgomery           Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door                Faber and Faber

Sarah Naughton             The Hanged Man Rises                                            Simon and Schuster

Chris Riddell                   Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse             Macmillan Children’s Books

Elizabeth Wein               Rose Under Fire                                                        Electric Monkey

Shortlist for the 2013 Costa Novel Award (163 entries)

Judges

Clemency Burton-Hill       Broadcaster and Author

Eithne Farry                     Reviewer, Critic and Author; Books Editor, Marie Claire

Gerard Woodward          Author and Professor of Fiction at Bath Spa University

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday)

During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact, an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to?

Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and has been a critically-acclaimed international author ever since. Her four most recent bestsellers featured the former detective Jackson Brodie: Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog. She was appointed MBE in the 2001 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Judges: “Daring, inventive, this is a feat of breathtaking imagination.”

Unexpected Lessons in Love by Bernardine Bishop (John Murray)

After a chance meeting in a doctor’s waiting-room, Cecilia Banks and Helen Gatehouse have become firm friends with a shared interest: both have been diagnosed with cancer. Whilst the two women contemplate their own mortality, they’re also facing different challenges; Cecilia’s war correspondent son Ian has unexpectedly fathered a child, Cephas, and calls on his mother to care for the baby, whilst a letter from an old acquaintance reminds Helen of a past that can no longer be ignored. As events unfold and the truth is revealed, Cecilia and Helen are united by their experiences not only of illness but of love, honesty and motherhood.

The great-granddaughter of the poet Alice Meynell, Bernardine Bishop was the youngest witness in the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960. After writing two early novels, she taught in a London comprehensive school for ten years and then went on to have a distinguished career as a psychotherapist, during which she brought up her two sons. Cancer forced her retirement in 2010 and she returned to her first love, fiction, completing Unexpected Lessons in Love and two further novels, Hidden Knowledge and The Street, before her death in July, 2013. Bernardine’s last two novels will be published posthumously.

Judges: “An unflinching, darkly funny story of love, obsession and illness that is unexpected in every way.”

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press)

It’s July 1976. In London, it hasn’t rained for months, gardens are filled with aphids, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he’s going round the cor¬ner to buy a newspaper. He doesn’t come back. The search for Robert brings Gretta’s children - two estranged sisters and a brother on the brink of divorce - back home, each with different ideas as to where their father might have gone. None of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share.

Maggie O`Farrell is the author of five previous novels: After You’d Gone; My Lover’s Lover; The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox; and The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She lives in Edinburgh.

Judges: “Once again, O’Farrell has created characters you fall in love with in a story that is a delicious and unputdownable read.”

All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape)

Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It’s just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep – every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags. It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake’s unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.

Evie Wyld is the author of one previous novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, which was shortlisted for the Impac Prize, the Orange Award for New Writers and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2011, she was named by the BBC as one of the twelve best new British novelists and in 2013, she was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in Peckham, London, where she runs the Review Bookshop.

Judges: “Tough, compelling, surprising and beautifully written – this book packs a real punch.”

Shortlist for the 2013 Costa First Novel Award (108 entries)

Judges

Rachael Beale           Web Manager, London Review of Books

Fanny Blake              Novelist, Journalist and Books Editor of Woman & Home

Matthew Cain            Writer and Broadcaster

Idiopathy by Sam Byers (Fourth Estate)

Katherine has given up trying to be happy. Thirty, stuck in a job and a town she hates, her mounting cynicism and vicious wit repel the people she wants to attract, and attract the people she knows she should repel. Her ex Daniel, meanwhile, isn’t sure that he loves his new girlfriend Angelica. But somehow not telling her he loves her has become synonymous with telling her that he doesn’t love her, meaning that he has to tell her he loves her just to maintain the status quo. When their former friend Nathan returns from a stint in a psychiatric ward - to find that his mother has transformed herself into bestselling author and Twitter superstar ‘MotherCourage’ - Katherine, Daniel and Nathan decide to meet to heal old wounds and reaffirm their friendship. But will a reunion end well? Almost certainly not.

Sam Byers was born in 1979. He is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing in the University of East Anglia. He has published fiction in Granta, Tank and Blank Pages and regularly reviews books for the TLS.

Judges: “A hilarious and breathtakingly well-written satire from a major new talent.”

Meeting the English by Kate Clanchy (Picador)

In 1989, the year of news, as London bakes through the hottest summer anyone can remember, one family is embroiled in its own private cataclysm. Phillip Prys has been silenced by a sudden, massive stroke. As his girlish third wife, Shirin, pads through their faded rooms, dignified in the face of bustling Myfanwy, back to manage her former husband’s care, their adolescent children, Jake and Celia, seek refuge in drugs and food.

Enter Struan. Built like a heron, fresh from Scotland, he is thrust – quite literally – into the bosom of the family, as Phillip’s seventeen-year-old nurse. He’s had experience of death, but not of London. Hampstead is a foreign country, with foreign food and foreign customs. But he finds that it also has a strange kind of magic. Under the influence of each Prys in turn, his life begins to alter in ways he could never have imagined. And so, in the meantime, do theirs . . .

Kate Clanchy was born and grew up in Scotland but now lives in England. She is a popular poet: her collections, Slattern, Samark and Newborn have brought her many literary awards and an unusually wide audience. She is the author of the much acclaimed Antigona and Me, and was the 2009 winner of the BBC Short Story Award. She has also written extensively for Radio 4 and reviews and writes comment for the Guardian.

Judges: “A gorgeous slice of a 1980s summer, stuffed with unconventional characters who stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.”

The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer (HarperCollinsPublishers)

The Shock of the Fall tells the story of Matthew and Simon, two brothers who are separated yet united by a tragic accident. Exploring themes of loss, grief and mental illness, this extraordinary novel transports the reader directly into the mind of Matthew and his slow descent into madness as he confronts his role in the boyhood death of his older brother ten years ago.

Nathan Filer is a registered mental health nurse. He is also a performance poet, contributing regularly to literary events across the UK, including Latitude, Port Eliot and the Cheltenham Literature Festival. His work has been broadcast on television and radio including BBC 3, BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5 Live. His 2005 poetry short film Oedipus won the BBC Best New Filmmaker Award and numerous other accolades, including Berlin’s Zebra Poetry Film Award and the Audience Choice at Toronto’s World of Comedy Film Festival.

Judges: “An exhilarating journey into the human mind that will leave you uplifted and transformed.”

Marriage Material by Sathnam Sanghera (William Heinemann)

To Arjan Banga, returning to the Black Country after the unexpected death of his father, his family’s corner shop represents everything he has tried to leave behind - a lethargic pace of life, insular rituals and ways of thinking. But when his mother insists on keeping the shop open, he finds himself being dragged back from London, forced into big decisions about his imminent marriage and uncovering the history of his broken family – the elopement and mixed-race marriage of his aunt Surinder, and the betrayals and loyalties, loves and regrets that have played out in the shop over more than fifty years.

Sathnam Sanghera was born in 1976. He is an award-winning writer for The Times. His first book, The Boy with the Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton, was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Biography Award and the 2009 PEN/Ackerley Prize and named 2009 Mind Book of the Year. Marriage Material has been picked by Waterstones as one of the fiction debuts of the year.

Judges: “Fresh, funny and thought-provoking – an epic tale of family life with characters that bounce off the page.”

Shortlist for the 2013 Costa Biography Award (101 entries)

Judges

Anne de Courcy            Author

Paul Ross                     Broadcaster and Journalist

Caroline Sanderson    Author, Reviewer and Non-Fiction Editor of The Bookseller

Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence and Emperor Penguins by Gavin Francis (Chatto & Windus)

Gavin Francis fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition when he spent fourteen months as the base-camp doctor at Halley, a profoundly isolated British research station on the Caird Coast of Antarctica. Antarctica offered a year of unparalleled silence and solitude, with a few distractions and very little human history, but also a rare opportunity to live among emperor penguins, the only species truly at home in the Arctic. Following the penguins throughout the year – from a summer of perpetual sunshine to months of winter darkness – Gavin Francis explores a world of great beauty conjured from the simplest of elements, the hardship of living at 50 degrees centigrade below zero and the unexpected comfort that the penguin community brings.

Gavin Francis was born in 1975 and brought up in Fife, Scotland. After qualifying from medical school in Edinburgh he spent ten years travelling, visiting all seven continents. He has worked in Africa and India, made several trips to the Arctic, and crossed Eurasia and Australasia by motorcycle. His first book, True North, was published in 2008. He has lectured widely and his essays have appeared in the Guardian, Granta and The London Review of Books. He lives in Edinburgh.

Judges: “A mesmerising account told in crystalline prose, of fourteen months spent in the silent vastness of the last unknown continent.”

Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz by Thomas Harding (William Heinemann)

Hanns Alexander was the son of a prosperous German family who fled Berlin for London in the 1930s. Rudolf Höss was a farmer and soldier who rose through the ranks of the SS to become the Kommandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, where he oversaw the deaths of over a million men, women and children. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. Lieutenant Hanns Alexander is one of the lead investigators, Rudolf Höss his most elusive target.

Thomas Harding is a journalist who has written for the Sunday Times, Financial Times and the Guardian, among other publications. He co-founded a television station in Oxford, England, and for many years was an award-winning publisher of a newspaper in West Virginia. He lives in Hampshire, England.

Judges: “A beautifully-balanced double biography, admirably measured but also gripping in its telling, which offers a fresh perspective on a much-examined subject.”

The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Fourth Estate)

In September 1919 Gabriele D’Annunzio, successful poet, dramatist and occasional politician with an innate flair for the melodramatic, declared himself the Commandante of the city of Fiume in modern day Croatia. He intended to establish the utopian modern state upon his muddled fascist and artistic ideals and create a social paradigm for the rest of the world. It was a fittingly dramatic pinnacle to a career that had been essentially theatrical.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions which was published in 1990 to wide acclaim, and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen, published in 2004, which garnered similar praise. Cleopatra won the Fawcett Prize and the Emily Toth Award. Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews for the Sunday Times. She lives in London.

Judges: “A classic, meticulously researched biography, told with a twist, and riveting in its historical sweep.”

The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink by Olivia Laing (Canongate)

Why is it that some of the greatest works of literature have been produced by writers in the grip of alcoholism, an addiction that cost them personal happiness and caused harm to those who loved them? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a journey across America to examine the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary writers - F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver, all of whom were alcoholics. It is also a personal journey for Olivia, wanting to make sense of alcoholism - a disease that had affected her own family.

 Olivia Laing's first book, To the River, was a book of the year in the Evening Standard, Independent and Financial Times and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. Olivia is the former Deputy Books Editor of the Observer and writes for a variety of publications, including the Observer, New Statesman, Guardian and Times Literary Supplement. She's a 2011 MacDowell Fellow, and has received awards from the Arts Council, The Society of Authors and the Authors' Foundation.

Judges: “An enthralling meld of memoir, travelogue, literary biography and personal journey, which sends you eagerly back to the work of six troubled but brilliant US writers.”

Shortlist for the 2013 Costa Poetry Award (94 entries)

Judges

John Burnside               Writer

Olivia Cole                     Poet and Journalist

Daniel Eltringham        Poetry Buyer, Dulwich Books

Dante: The Divine Comedy by Clive James (Picador)

The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and this translation—decades in the making—gives the entire epic as a single, coherent and compulsively readable lyric poem. In his introductory essay, James says that the twin secrets of Dante are texture and impetus. All the packed detail must be there, but the thing must move. It should go from start to finish with an unflagging rhythm. In the original, the basic form is the terza rima, a measure hard to write in English without showing the strain of reaching once too often for a rhyme. In this translation, the basic form is the quatrain. The result, uncannily, is the same easy-seeming flow, a wonderful momentum that propels the reader along the pilgrim’s path from Hell to Heaven, from despair to revelation.

Clive James was born in Sydney in 1939. He is the author of more than thirty books. As well as his collections of verse and his five volumes of autobiography, he has published collections of literary criticism, television criticism, travel writing and novels. He appeared regularly for both the BBC and ITV as a television presenter and performer during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia, in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature and he was honoured with a CBE in the Queen’s last New Year Honours list.

Judges: “A towering achievement that will stand the test of time.”

Division Street by Helen Mort (Chatto & Windus)

From the clash between striking miners and police to the delicate conflicts in personal relationships, Helen Mort’s stunning debut is marked by distance and division. Named for a street in Sheffield, this is a collection that cherishes specificity: the particularity of names; the reflections the world throws back at us; the precise moment of a realisation. Distinctive and assured, these poems show how, at the site of conflict, a moment of reconciliation can be born.

Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985, and grew up in nearby Chesterfield. Five-times-winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. In 2010, she was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. She lives in Derbyshire.

Judges: “Wonderful meeting of lyrical poetry, political engagement and a powerful sense of place.”

Hill of Doors by Robin Robertson (Picador)

Charged with strangeness and beauty, Hill of Doors is a haunted and haunting book, where each successive poem seems a shape conjured from the shadows, and where the uncanny is made physically present. The collection sees the return of some familiar members of the Robertson company – including Strindberg and the shape-shifter Dionysus. Four loose retellings of stories of the Greek god form pillars for the book, alongside four short Ovid versions. Threaded through these are a series of pieces about the poet’s childhood on the north-east coast, his fascination with the sea and the islands of Scotland.

Robin Robertson is from the north-east coast of Scotland. His four previous collections have received a number of honours including the E M Forster Award and various Forward Prizes. His last collection, The Wrecking Light, was shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Poetry Award and the T S Eliot Prize.

Judges: “Passionate and powerful interweaving of personal and mythic sustained across the form of a collection.”

Drysalter by Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape)

Michael Symmons Roberts’s sixth – and most ambitious – collection to date takes its name from the ancient trade in powders, chemicals, salts and dyes, paints and cures. These poems offer a similarly potent and sensory multiplicity, unified through the formal constraint of 150 poems of 15 lines. Like the medieval psalters echoed in its title, this collection contains both the sacred and profane. Here are hymns of praise and lamentation, songs of wonder and despair, journeying effortlessly through physical and metaphysical landscapes, from financial markets and urban sprawl to deserts and dark nights of the soul.

Michael Symmons Roberts has published five collections of poetry, including Corpus, which won the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award. He has also published two novels, Patrick’s Alphabet and Breath, and a non-fiction book Edgelands (with Paul Farley). He is a frequent collaborator with the composer James MacMillan and as a radio writer and documentary film-maker has won Sony, Sandford St Martin and Clarion Awards.

Judges: “He combines philosophical depth with a lightness of touch.”

Shortlist for the 2013 Costa Children’s Book Award (151 entries)

Judges

Jo Anne Cocadiz             Children’s Book Buyer, Foyles

Emma Kennedy              Author, Columnist and Scriptwriter

Philip Womack              Author and Critic

Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door by Ross Montgomery (Faber and Faber)

So Alex Jennings has a problem. His mum’s sent him away to boarding school because his father, the most famously failed explorer in the history of the Cusp, has escaped from hospital again, yelling ‘squiggles’. Now the evil Davidus Kyte and all his henchmen are after Alex, convinced he alone knows the meaning of the word ‘squiggles’. Actually, Alex Jennings is a boy with a lot of problems! But with the help of a talking dog and a girl with unfeasibly sharp teeth, he just might have what it takes to cross the Forbidden Lands, escape the evil Davidus Kyte, and find out what lies beyond the Cusp . . .

Ross Montgomery is a first-time author. He started writing stories as a teenager, when he really should have been doing homework, and continued doing so at university. After graduating, he experimented with working as a pig farmer and a postman before deciding to channel these skills into teaching at a primary school. He lives in Finsbury Park with his girlfriend and many, many dead plants.

Judges: “Eccentric, hilarious, magical and touching – a rollicking yarn.”

The Hanged Man Rises by Sarah Naughton (Simon and Schuster)

When their parents are killed in a fire, Titus Adams and his younger sister Hannah are left to fend for themselves in the cruel and squalid slums of Victorian London. Taking shelter with his friend and saviour, Inspector Pilbury, Titus should feel safe. But though the inspector has just caught and hung a notorious child-murderer, the murders haven’t stopped. Now everyone is a suspect, even the inspector himself, and unless Titus can find a way to end the killings, he will lose all that is dear to him. But as the killer closes in, Titus finds he is running out of time to avoid a catastrophe close to home. For this evil cannot be contained, even by death.

Sarah Naughton grew up in Dorset. She escaped to London aged seventeen to study English at UCL, and has lived there ever since. She spent ten years writing advertisements before giving up to have children. The Hanged Man Rises is her first novel and she is currently writing a second. She lives in South London with her husband and two sons.

Judges: “This is a beautifully evoked, gripping, Victorian chiller which will appeal to boys and girls.”

Goth Girl: and the Ghost of a Mouse by Chris Riddell (Macmillan Children’s Books)

Meet Ada Goth. She lives in Ghastly-Gorm Hall with her father, Lord Goth, lots of servants and at least half a dozen ghosts, but she hasn’t got any friends to explore her enormous, creepy house with. Then, one night, everything changes when Ada meets a ghostly mouse called Ishmael. Together they set out to solve the mystery of the strange happenings at Ghastly-Gorm Hall, and get a lot more than they bargained for....

Chris Riddell is an author and illustrator. His picture books include The Emperor of Absurdia, Wendel’s Workshop and a much-loved graphic novel series; Ottoline and the Yellow Cat, Ottoline Goes to School and Ottoline at Sea. He collaborates with Paul Stewart on three series’ of books for the YA market; Edge Chronicles, The Immortals and Wyrmweald, and for younger children, his Fergus Crane adventure series, again written by Paul Stewart, has achieved critical success. Chris is also a renowned political cartoonist whose work appears regularly in The Observer, The Literary Review and The New Statesman. Chris Riddell lives in Brighton.

Judges: “Wonderful, charming, delightful and inventive.”

Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein (Electric Monkey)

In 1944, desperate to help with the war effort, young American Rose Justice makes the long trip to the UK where her flying skills gain her a place in the British Air Transport Auxiliary. Confronted by the realities of war on the home front – rationing, grief, fear and exhaustion – Rose is forced to grow up quickly. Whilst returning from a drop-off in France, her plane is intercepted by Germans and Rose is interred in the notorious Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp where she experiences unspeakable horrors. The end of the war brings liberation, safety and peace, but its effects remain as Rose seeks to piece her life back together and make something good come out of something so terrible.

Elizabeth Wein was born in New York, and grew up in England, Jamaica and Pennsylvania. She is married with two children and now lives in Perth, Scotland. Elizabeth is a member of the Ninety-Nines, the International Organization of Women Pilots. She was awarded the Scottish Aero Club’s Watson Cup for best student pilot in 2003 and it was her love of flying that partly inspired the idea for Code Name Verity, shortlisted for over 50 awards including the Carnegie Medal. In 2012, Code Name Verity was a Boston Globe/Horn Book Awards Honor Book, and a New York Times bestseller. In 2013 it was awarded a Printz Honor.

Judges: “This is a heart-wrenching, wonderfully-presented book full of tension and tenderness that all teenagers should read.”

-ENDS-