There are just under four months to go till the 26 February 2010 deadline of the second Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children’s Book Award 2010:

Frances Lincoln Limited, the award-winning publisher, and Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books, are proud to announce the second Diverse Voices Award in memory of Frances Lincoln (1945 – 2001), to encourage and promote diversity in children’s fiction.

The Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children’s Book Award is for a manuscript that celebrates cultural diversity in the widest possible sense, either in terms of its story or the ethnic and cultural origins of its author.

The prize of £1,500, plus the option for Frances Lincoln Children’s Books to publish the novel, will be awarded to the best work of unpublished fiction for 8-to-12-year-olds by a writer, aged 16 years or over, who has not previously published a novel for children. The writer may have contributed to an anthology of prose or poetry. The work must be written in English and it must be a minimum of 15,000 words and a maximum of 35,000 words.

For more details and to download an entry form, visit the Seven Stories website.

Australian writer, Cristy Burne’s 2009 winning book, Takeshita Demons, is due to be launched at the 2010 award ceremony in June next year. After being tantalized by an extract at the 2009 Award ceremony (you can read my post about it here), I can’t wait! Cristy has a fabulous blog, which includes great interviews of the other shortlisted writers. She and her husband, along with their three-month-old baby, have just returned to Australia after living in the UK for two and a half years, so we wish them all the best for this new stage of their journey…

Cristy Burne, winner of the 2009 Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children’s Book Award, has set up a blog to track the progress of her novel Takeshita Demons from winning the award through to publication. She is running a series of blog posts featuring a questionnaire completed by each of the people on the shortlist – check out the first one, Folake Idowu of Nigeria, who wrote the intriguing-sounding Gbenga and the Reticent Chromosome, and who also has a blog… These interviews will be well worth following – voices of new writers from across the world!

The first winner of the ground-breaking new Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children’s Book Award is Cristy Burne for her manuscript Takeshita Demons, “a fast-paced adventure story” about a Japanese schoolgirl in the UK who confronts the demons that have followed her family from Japan. She wins £1,500 and the option of having her novel published by Frances Lincoln Limited. Christy, who has Australian/ New Zealand dual nationality, currently lives in the UK. As well as studying Japanese at school, she has lived and worked in Japan, which is when she first heard about the yokai. Speaking about these supernatural spirits in an interview with Geraldine Brennan, one of the Award’s judges, Christy explained:

“There are dozens of supernatural yokai that most Japanese people will be familiar with. They appear over and over again in all kinds of stories. Some are benign, some are nasty and some you’re just not quite sure. The demons that Miku [the book’s young heroine] has to deal with include the nukekubi, a kind of child-eating flying-head demon, and the noppera-bo, a faceless demon that can take on other personae.

Most Western children don’t know about these yokai in the way that they know about vampires and werewolves, but just as vampires fear garlic, the demons often have an Achilles heel or fatal flaw. The nukekubi, for example, must leave its body somewhere while its hungry head flies around, and you can destroy the head by destroying the body. I chose the demons I thought would have the most potential for an adventure story, but there are plenty more for future stories. I like to write about children, especially strong girls, having great adventures.”

Created in memory of publisher Frances Lincoln, who died in 2001, the award was co-founded by Frances Lincoln Publishers and Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle in the UK. The Award was announced on Thursday at Seven Stories, which was a magical and perfectly fitting place to host the evening and I will be devoting a separate post to it next week. This is a photo of Hannah Green, archivist at Seven Stories, with a display of books and manuscripts from the collection.

In her introduction to this inaugural presentation of the Award, Kate Edwards, Chief Executive of Seven Stories, talked about the importance of highlighting global communication in a way that will promote understanding; and of finding the right voices to communicate with the 8-12 age group. She made a very striking point about considering books as cultural mirrors – sometimes they offer a true reflection of their contemporary society; sometimes they distort or play with that reflection.

John Nicoll, Managing Director of Frances Lincoln Limited, then spoke as Frances’ husband of his quest to establish the right kind of project in her memory: and this, he felt, was exactly what she would have supported, in its promotion both of new talent and of good stories to provide a bridge for people who find the unknown challenging. (more…)