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Chicken House competition expands as it reaches 15-year milestone
It’s 15 years since the Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition launched. The joint venture between Somerset-based children’s indie Chicken House and the Times newspaper is open to unpublished and unagented writers of fiction of any genre for children from seven years old up to Young Adult. The winner gets a worldwide publishing contract with a £10,000 advance and an offer of representation by Curtis Brown’s Davinia Andrew-Lynch.
Chicken House m.d. Barry Cunningham says the competition came about because “we were a little bit frustrated as a publisher of brand-new writers... We felt the work that we were getting from agents and from other publishers was a bit samey and we wanted to reach out”. Therefore, the aim is to award the manuscript that demonstrates “the greatest entertainment value, quality, originality and suitability for children”. He added: “This [competition] seemed like a good idea, but I don’t think we anticipated quite how successful it was going to be or quite how many people we were going to publish. We thought that maybe it would be adventurous to expect that we’d be able to publish the winner every year. But actually, we publish more than one every year I think — pretty regularly two or three — and that’s been a glorious surprise.”
The competition has kickstarted the career of many acclaimed writers, with over half of the shortlistees going on to be published. These include Sophia Bennett, who won the first iteration of the competition with “a lovely warm family story”, Threads, and is now writing adult cosy crime. More recent recipients include Jasbinder Bilan, whose winning novel Asha & The Spirit Bird scooped the Children’s category at the 2019 Costa Book Awards, and Efua Traoré’s Children of the Quicksands, which was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2022 Younger Fiction category. Cunningham also mentions Tom Ellen and Lucy Ivison’s shortlisted YA rom-com Lobsters (“I still laugh about that”), Nicki Thornton’s The Last Chance Hotel (“that’s now a huge series”) and Varsha Shah’s Waterstones Children’s Book Prize-shortlisted Ajay and the Mumbai Sun (“a perfect children’s book—a gang of children sorting their own lives out”) as further highlights from the submissions over the years.
A new development for the 2023 competition is bringing Kat McKenna Marketing on board to spearhead the campaign strategy. Chicken House’s head of marketing Jazz Bartlett explains: “Already, this is the biggest children’s fiction competition in the UK. So, primarily, we’re looking to expand our pool of entrants through looking at other kinds of creatives.” For example, she cites the “massive writing community on TikTok... that perhaps don’t know about the competition or those traditional routes of publishing” as well as "people from screenwriting communities or people that have never really thought of themselves as a writer”. McKenna will be helping the team “expand the reach of the competition as best as we can by reaching new pools of writers”, providing social media support and liaising with sponsor, TV production company Lime Pictures.
Another exciting addition this year is the Lime Pictures New Storyteller Award, a bespoke prize sponsored by Lime Pictures, to be awarded to the submission which shows the greatest TV development potential as chosen by Cunningham and Lime Pictures’ Tim Compton. The winner will receive a £7,500 publishing contract plus an offer of representation. Reflecting on the reasons for adding this new strand, Cunningham said: “We’ve worked with Lime over quite a lot of years and I’ve always been interested in how they see a story developing. It’s quite often complementary to the way that we’ve seen a published story working, but also sometimes refreshingly different.” He hopes that through this new aspect of their partnership, they will be able to “try and broaden the basis of what a new writer is” and find “people who want to tell stories in slightly different ways”.
Reflecting on how the competition has developed since it opened, Cunningham reports “more and more YA entries over the years, writing more challenging material for the YA market”. The profile of the competition has also grown both in the UK and abroad, with last year’s shortlist featuring more international than UK-based writers. Looking ahead to where the competition might go next, he said: “We want to encourage entries from a wider base of diversity – including entries from all ages, and highlighting possible approaches from writers of fan-fiction, script treatments and other types of writing, for example.” He added: “We are also keen to explore the idea of Chicken House being the home of new writing, and more generally, development and creativity. But of course, our aim is always primarily to discover wonderful new stories!”
The Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition is open until 1st June 2023 at 11.59 p.m. GMT. More information on how to enter can be found here.
