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Début authors and small presses strong on YA Book Prize shortlist for 2023
Four first-time writers appear on this year’s shortlist for the YA Book Prize, with the winner once again to be revealed at a ceremony at August’s Edinburgh International Book Festival.
This year’s 10-strong YA Book Prize shortlist features several début titles from small presses alongside books by established authors including Holly Jackson and Alex Wheatle.
Malaysian author Nadia Mikail has made the list with her award-winning début The Cats We Meet Along the Way. Acquired through Oxford indie Guppy Books’ first open submissions competition in 2020, it went on to scoop the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize earlier this year. Set in a world threatened by apocalypse, it focuses on Aisha’s road trip across Malaysia to reconnect with her estranged sister. Irish indie Little Island also appears on the shortlist with another first-time novel, Louise Finch’s The Eternal Return of Clara Hart, which sees teenager Spencer re-live the same day several times over as he wakes up to the misogyny and toxic masculinity around him.
Leicester-based Sweet Cherry Publishing has also made the shortlist with début The Songs You’ve Never Heard, co-penned by singer-songwriter Becky Jerams and Bafta-winning songwriter and musician Ellie Wyatt. Their book sees social media influencer Meg’s life collide with songwriter Alana as both girls try to find their voices in a world that wants to keep them silent. The final new author on the shortlist is Cynthia So with queer romance If You Still Recognise Me (Little Tiger Press), in which Elsie is gearing up to tell her long-distance friend Ada she has a crush on her, until her long-lost best friend Joan walks back into her life.
Farshore’s YA imprint Electric Monkey has three titles on the list. Nominated for the first time is Laura Steven with The Society for Soulless Girls, a funny and dark thriller with a supernatural twist, set in an elite university where students are being murdered. The other two Electric Monkey titles are Twin Crowns by Catherine Doyle and Katherine Webber and Holly Jackson’s Five Survive. Though Jackson and Webber have been nominated for the prize before, it is the first shortlisting for Irish author Doyle. Her romantic fantasy Twin Crowns, co-written with her sister-in-law Webber, tells the story of twin princesses who are separated at birth and live in entirely different worlds until one must complete a mission to steal her sister’s place in the palace. Jackson’s cat-and-mouse thriller sees a group of teenagers on a road trip which takes a sinister turn when they break down in the middle of nowhere and realise that a sniper is outside targeting them.
Danielle Jawando, Melinda Salisbury and Alex Wheatle are returning names on the shortlist. Jawando’s second book When Our Worlds Collided (S&S Children’s) won the Jhalak Children’s & YA Prize 2023. A coming-of-age story about chance encounters, injustice and how the choices that we make can change our future, it sees three teenagers from very different walks of life unexpectedly brought together by a stabbing outside of a Manchester shopping centre. Her Dark Wings (David Fickling Books) is Salisbury’s modern-day reimagining of the Persephone myth; in it, two friends go on a dangerous journey into the Underworld. Wheatle’s Kemosha of the Caribbean (Andersen Press) is the tale of an escaped slave girl’s adventures on the high seas.
Teenage kicks
The YA Book Prize was launched by The Bookseller in 2014 to celebrate books for teenagers and young adults and to encourage this audience to read and buy more books. For the second year in a row, it is being organised in association with Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF), with the shortlisted authors to appear on the festival programme and the winner to be announced during a live ceremony at the event on Thursday 24th August. The prize is chaired by The Bookseller’s children’s editor and deputy features editor Caroline Carpenter, with EIBF’s children’s and schools programme director Rachel Fox joining the judging panel for a third year. Carpenter said: “I am delighted to unveil this year’s YA Book Prize shortlist, featuring lots of exciting new voices and a real range of genres, from hard-hitting contemporary stories to inventive fantasies and thrilling page-turners. There is something for everyone to enjoy on this list.”
Carpenter and Fox will be joined by teenage judges representing shadowing schools from across the UK; author Patrice Lawrence, whose début novel Orangeboy (Hodder Children’s Books) won the YA Book Prize in 2017 as well as the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize for Older Readers; Waterstones’ national children’s events co-ordinator, Gary Deane; and Charley Robinson, founder of UK YA book subscription box Paper Orange UK. Lawrence said: “The YA Book Prize kick-started my writing career in 2017. It’s an honour to be asked to return and a joy to read such a wonderfully eclectic list of books.” Robinson and Deane were respectively “excited and honoured” and “thrilled” to be judging the prize, with the latter adding: “I can’t wait to get stuck into this year’s incredible shortlist.”
More information about the YA Book Prize 2023 shortlist and judges can be found here. The prize will be celebrating and amplifying the shortlisted books and authors through its social media channels and website in a dedicated campaign running from 3rd July to 6th August.
