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£1,500, plus the option for Frances Lincoln Children’s Books to publish the novel, will be awarded to the best work of unpublished fiction for 8-to-12-year-olds by a writer, aged 16 years or over, who has not previously published a novel for children.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…