This year’s award was won by Helen Limon for her story Om Shanti, Babe, “a story about growing up, family and friendship” described by the judges as “Fabulous . . . laugh-out-loud funny.” They were looking for a “strong story that an 8 to 12-year-old would want to read rather than a worthy book
that overtly explores social issues.” We were treated to an extract from the book and it certainly sounds like they found what they were looking for. Now we will have to be patient while we wait for the manuscript to go through its due process towards publication. To whet your appetite, here’s a brief synopsis:

Teenager Cassia joins her mother, who runs a fair trade craft shop, on a buying trip to India, a country that she mostly knows from her Bollywood dance routines. Troubled by a friendship gone sour at home, and feeling out of place in a new culture that challenges her assumptions, she reacts badly to her mother’s relationship with an Indian colleague. As Cassia sheds some of her preconceived ideas, she finds friends where she least expects to and starts to realise her dream to follow her mother into business. The story emcompasses fair trade and environmental issues alongside her spiky tussles with fashion-mad friend-to-be Priyanka, and her crushes on pop star Jonny Gold and Dev, a boy she meets on a train.

Helen had put together a display of pictures and objects she had brought back from a trip to Kerola, India in 2009, which was the inspiration for her book:

“Talking to the mothers about their lives and their ambitions for their families, and listening to
what the children said they wanted, inspired the story and made me conscious of the social and environmental themes that are woven into the book.

“My characters are not the sort of children that get written about much and I lived most of my life not in
England, so I do sort of know what it is like to be different inside your head even if you look like everyone
else on the outside.”

Runner-up in the competition was Karon Aldermon for her story For Keeps about Benedicta (Ben), her mother and younger sister who are asylum seekers from Cameroon. “While their uncertain future and hand-to-mouth existence cast a shadow over Ben’s friendships and fun times at school glee club and on church outings, she has decided that Newcastle is her home. With her friend Becky, she resolves to help a bullied schoolfriend, Jaz.” Karon received a Special Mention for her manuscript The Story Thief in last year’s competition, and wrote a Guest Post for our PaperTigers issue focusing on Refugee Children in August.

This year a Special Mention went to Australian Michelle Richardson for her Tek , “who accompanies her cold and distant father, an expert on Australian Aboriginal culture, to a desert army base, where her gift for communicating with the ngepan (spirits of the dead) surfaces just when it
is most inconvenient.” Again, it sounded really intriguing…

The occasion also marked the official book launch both of last year’s winner, Too Much Trouble by Tom Avery, and the sequel to the 2009 inaugural award-winning Takeshita Demons, The Filth Licker by Christy Burne. Christy sent a special message to the Divers Voices “family” from her home in Australia, and it was great that Tom was actually able to be present. He was clearly delighted to be celebrating the publication of Too Much Trouble and it was good to know that he is working towards his second book, despite a busy year (new baby, new home and new job, teaching in an ethnically diverse promary school in London). Earlier in the day Tom had given a presentation at a local school. For one activity he had encouraged the pupils to conjure up the different emotions in some highly-charged scenes by creating tableaux. While telling us about it, Tom press-ganged some volunteers, students from Lancaster University, to do just that – as you can see from the photo…

In her introduction to the Awards Ceremony, Seven Stories’ Chief Executive Kate Edwards announced the good news that the Award, which had originally been funded for three years, would continue for at least another three. This is thanks to Seven Stories’ commitment to the Award and the financial backing they are able to give because of their inclusion in Arts Council England’s National Portfolio, as well as to the continued support of Arts & Business. In order to encourage more entries from writers’ groups around the UK, it was also announced that the closing date for the fouurth Diverse Voices Award has been extended until 31st December 2012 – so if you have been toying with the idea of entering, now’s your chance; just contact Helena McConnell the Award Coordinator at helenaATsevenstoriesDOTorgDOTuk or diversevoicesATsevenstoriesDOTorgDOTuk for an application form… And for more information generally about the Award, go here.

The Award was announced at Seven Stories in Newcastle, and the occasion also marked the launch of Too Much Trouble, winner of the Award last year, by Tom Avery, and of The Filth Licker by Christy Burne, a sequel to her 2009 winner Takeshita Demons.

This great official photo shows (l-r) Helen, Tom and Karon with the three published books. You can also see some of my photos from the Awards Ceremony here; and read more about the Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Award here.

Too Much Trouble is the story of two [illegal immigrant] brothers, Emmanuel and Prince. Emmanuel tells us his story as he looks back on how events led to him holding a gun to a man’s head. The story opens on an ordinary day for the boys at school where they strive to go unnoticed, fending for themselves on handouts fom their drug-dealer uncle and living in a house where they compete for space with their uncle’s marijuana. But life changes completely when their temperamental uncle decides the boys are too much trouble and withdraws his already limited support. Left to look after themselves, the brothers are led into a life of crime from which Emmanuel cannot see a way out.

I have just returned home from Seven Stories in Newcastle, where the annoucement was made – and was lucky enough to hear Tom reading an extract from Too Much Trouble – it was part of where Emmanuel describes his last “ordinary day” – and I wished he could have continued a little longer. Instead, we will be looking forward to this time next year when Too Much Trouble will be published – just like the winner of last year’s inaugural Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Award, Cristy Burne‘s Takeshita Demons, which was launched today (and do read Cristy’s great blog, which charts the book’s progress from manuscript to print…).

In my review of Takeshita Demons, I said I hoped there might be a sequel – well, it was really welcome news to hear today that not only will there be a second book published next year, with the intriguing title The Filth Licker, but in 2012 a third title will be published to complete the trilogy: The Matsui Monster.

Not only that, but Takeshita Demons is to be featured in Booktrust’s Children’s Book Week Pack, which will be sent to all UK primary schools, and has also been selected for this year’s Booked Up list, which gives a free book to every child in their first year at secondary school.

I will be writing a bit more about the awards evening soon – I just wanted to share the news straight away. Congratulations, both to Tom and to Cristy.

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…

“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.

In all, there were fifty entries, mostly from the UK but also from Australia, Canada, Germany, India, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland and the US, from writers from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. These were whittled down by Seven Stories to a shortlist of ten and the panel of four judges selected the final four (who were all presented with a copy of the superb We Are All Born Free):

Winner: Takeshita Demons by Cristy Burne;
Highly Commended: The Gift by Gemma Birss;
Commended: The Ever-changing Mum by Ruth Patterson;
Special Mention: The Queen of Sheba’s Feet by Clare Reddaway.

The judges treated us to an outline of each of these books – and Cristy then read us a very exciting extract from Takeshita Demons, seated in Seven Stories’ glorious Storyteller’s throne. We will now have to be patient and wait for the book to go through the practical publishing process before we’ll be able to read the rest of it. And it was tantalising too to hear about the other three novels and not be able to run and pick them up afterwards!

At the beginning of this post I described the award as ground-breaking: this is because it seeks both to celebrate diversity and to foster new talent. Entries must be unpublished manuscripts aimed at 8-12 year olds from writers who have not previously published a novel for children (although they may have contributed to an anthology of prose or poetry). The Award’s stated purpose is fourfold:

To take positive steps to increase the representation of people writing from or about different cultural perspectives whose work is published in Britain today;
To promote new writing for children, especially by or about people whose culture and voice is currently under-represented;
To recognise that as children’s books shape our earliest perceptions of the world and its cultures, promoting writing that represents diversity will contribute to social and cultural tolerance;
To support the process of writing rather than, as with the majority of prizes, promoting the publication.

The closing date for entries for the 2010 Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children’s Book Award is 26 February 2010.

You can read more about the Award on both Seven Stories’ and Frances Lincoln’s websites, including how to enter…