The YA Book Prize 2023 - Edinburgh Book Festival
I was so thrilled to find out that “The Songs You’ve Never Heard” was shortlisted for The YA Book Prize 2023 and this week I got to attend the awards ceremony in beautiful Edinburgh alongside the other amazing shortlisted authors.
We started the day with a live panel interview chaired by Katie Fraser from The Bookseller who was a fantastic host. I got to chat about the themes of Songs alongside authors Danielle Jawando (When Our Worlds Collided) and Alex Wheatle (Kemosha Of The Caribbean) and we had 380 young readers in the audience! Definitely the biggest crowd I have spoken to about books so far!
Straight after the panel, we had a book signing with the schools who had attended the event and got to meet a huge crowd of readers which was just fantastic. They were all so lovely and encouraging and I absolutely loved chatting to everyone about books, music, and the day in general.
In the afternoon, more of the shortlisted authors joined us for the official Author’s Meet - I cannot tell you how lovely this group of talented people was and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know everyone a little bit better. It was also nice to have other people to share the nerves with and to be able to cheer each other on!
Next up was the official awards ceremony hosted by S. F. Said. Every author had to give a reading or talk on their book in front of a live audience and it was so interesting and inspiring to hear everyone speak on their craft and process. I decided to read the “Doom Spiral” extract from Songs and it was amazing to hear the crowd laughing along! Here we are all lined up and excited for the night:
Danielle Jawando was crowned the winner and it was so well deserved - her book “When Our Worlds Collided” is a fantastic and powerful novel about three teenagers who are brought together when they witness a stabbing in a shopping centre. It explores very important themes on race, the media and the justice system, and hearing Danielle talk about the story and her future writing projects was really inspiring.
Straight after the awards, we were all brought to the Waterstones tent for another signing - it was so nice to chat to more readers and Nadia Mikail and I were giggling about the stress of creating the perfect author signature… I’m glad it’s not just me who overthinks it haha!
I ended the night with a lovely dinner with Danielle, Laura and our publishing teams (which is a pinch-myself sentence if ever I wrote one) - what an absolutely fab week! Thank you so much to everyone behind the scenes who made it happen and to everyone who came out to celebrate UK YA. It is definitely a day I will never forget as long as I live!
