We were very pleased to announce last night that the students who took part in the Trinity Schools Book Award 2017 had voted for The Bubble Boy as their top read! Stewart Foster was delighted to receive the prize, and said that for him that was ‘better than 10k hits on Twitter’. There were long queues at his signing desk as well, with students eager to talk to him and to get writing tips.
Marcus Sedgwick is the author of our shortlisted book ‘She is not invisible’. He is a prolific author with his books being shortlisted for the prestigious Carnegie medal no less than six times. She is not Invisible has won four other awards so far, and was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Book Award. In order to write She is not Invisible Marcus worked closely with students and their librarian in a school for visually impaired students, so that he could understand more closely what it was like to be his heroine, and the students checked his novel for facts before publishing.His latest, just published book Saint Death is a searingly honest story about life in South America, most particularly about the grinding poverty a rich lifestyle imposes on the poor. We hope you enjoy She is not Invisible, and go on to read Marcus’s other books.
The Award Ceremony is going to be held at Dulwich College on March 7th 2017. Hope to see you there!
Welcome to the third year of the Trinity Schools Book Award. This year, our theme is Sense-sational – exploring the five senses in fiction. A slight change to the format, based on feedback is that this year we shall have only one main list of books, with a supplementary further reading list called Trinity Plus. Creative responses can be made on any book on any list, and reviews can also be written on all books. Please do respond to the books on the website as well. The only restriction is the the winner will be chosen from the main list, although all of the books will enhance your experience of all of the senses. Enjoy reading the books!
I hope you enjoyed the Ceremony – it was a very busy, and fun time. There was so much to do -including uploading to the new Flikr feed – that announcing the winners on this website was a little delayed. So without further ado – the winner of the Junior Award was JRR Tolkien for The Hobbit, and for the Senior Award it was Douglas Adams for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Obviously, with both of our authors being deceased, nobody was present at the ceremony to get the prizes. However, Julie Crisp, former editor at Pan MacMillan who worked on the rerelease of his books, sent us this moving tribute to Douglas Adams, which was read out, and which emphasized how his books have remained current today:
‘It’s thrilling to hear that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has won the TSBA Senior Award and even more so that it was voted on by the students themselves. Considering the first book was published in the late 70s it’s a testament to the wit and wisdom of Douglas that these books are just as relevant, warm, funny and original to generations of readers today as they were when they were first published. I, unfortunately, never got to work with Douglas but did get to look after the books and work on the new editions which were released in 2009. I’ve been a huge fan of the books since I was a child and discovered during my management of them that for readers like Russell T Davies, Neil Gaiman, Stephen Fry and even Elon Musk (one of the most influential tech people today and the inspiration for Marvel’s Tony Stark) the books and characters played a huge part in their teen years and hold a special place in their hearts.
Douglas was a visionary. He would have blown a gasket at modern technology today. And 
would, no doubt, have had a huge amount of fun on social media. He was not a natural writer – he really had to work at it. One of his most famous quotes is: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound as they make as they go by.” He did not find writing easy. His creativeness was almost too much to be constrained on the page by words alone. But he persevered. I love this quote from the man himself: “He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.” It’s because of this self-deprecating humour, his energy, his dedication and his very clear and never-ending wonder at humanity and the universe that he left us the legacy of an enduring and engaging timeless series that will, hopefully, continue to delight new generations of readers well into the future.
March 9th is nearly on us – the day we all get to find out which of the books we have all been reading wins the prize this year! And also, which students win our top reviews and top creative response prizes. There have been some amazing creative responses – have a look at the individual book pages for responses to the books. So I hope you are all ready to meet our three amazing authors – Matt Dickinson, Philip Reeve and Paul Dowswell. There will be an author Q&A, so you will be able to ask questions about their books as well. We are really looking forward to going – I do hope you are too. See you all there – can’t wait!
Our third guest author is Matt Dickinson – whom some of you have already had the privilege of meeting when he visited your school. Matt has written the very exciting book The Everest Files, which is the first in a trilogy. By the time of the Awards Ceremony on 9 March, his second book, North Face, will be published. This will continue the story of Ryan Hart, whom we have been reading about in The Everest Files.
What makes Matt’s book so interesting is that he himself has climbed Everest, and so we know that all of the scenes on the mountain are absolutely authentic. Matt has also been a 
cameraman for National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, amongst others, so he has a wide experience of travelling to exciting places. He also continues to climb mountains. You can find out more about Matt and the books he has written and films he has made on his website here: http://www.mattdickinson.com/ Do look out for the sequels to The Everest Files, or read his other exciting trilogy, the Mortal Chaos series. We are all looking forward to meeting Matt at the Ceremony!
