Southern Schools Book Award 2024 Presentation Evening
Friday February 23rd 2024, 5.30 pm, Hurstpierpoint College
This year we had a full to bursting theatre, with 30 schools sending their readers to the finale of a year of preparation, reading and voting. The sense of excitement was palpable, as Chris Riddell, now a firmly established presence, was sat on stage, drawing and sharing his ideas of each of the five finalist’s stories and the students and librarians took their seats.
Suddenly, the lights dimmed, the music boomed, and Chris Bradford, this year’s host, jumped into action, mock boxing his way down through the auditorium and onto the stage. He explained about the intense training he does to learn boxing, close protection skills and martial arts to inform the details of his series ‘Bodyguard’ and ‘Young Samurai’. He also spoke about the enthusiasm for reading, vicariously living other lives through the characters of a book and how important reading for pleasure is as a life skill.
He introduced our finalist authors; Brianna Bourne; Sue Divin; Tia Fisher; Ravena Guron and Laura Wood onto the stage and each in turn gave a short talk about why they’d written their stories. Brianna explained ‘The half life of love’ came from working in science and understanding that drugs have a ‘half-life’ which she wondered – if it applied to the human life span, how that might change behaviours.
Sue explained about her work in Belfast in the peace process and how that had informed her story, not just on religious grounds but other areas of potential conflict in families around sexuality, infidelity and secrets.
Tia based her verse story about county lines on the son of a friend who’d had this experience; she decided that some of the imagery she could use in a verse format would make the story even more powerful – we agreed!
Ravenna spoke with great enthusiasm for the murder mystery genre and the uncomfortable situation someone from a less privileged background might feel in a wealthy boarding school.
Finally Laura Wood spoke candidly about her ideas for a book, how she’d sent a ‘treatment’, a kind of synopsis of her idea into a competition, won it and had to then produce the entire manuscript in two weeks! She encouraged all budding writers in the audience to write about what they know, and just keep writing. She also joked about how some of her characters ended up having conversations she hadn’t planned and which took the story in a new direction.
All the time Chris Riddell was drawing away, creating ripples of amusement from the audience and making the authors look nervously over their shoulders! Chris Bradford then introduced questions from different schools to each author and Chris Riddell then presented book tokens to a representative from each attending school – everyone there would get a free book and be able to have it signed by the author. Book Nook, our wonderful independent book shop in Hove, were on hand, poised to provide hundreds of books for our attendees to choose from.
Then, Chris Bradford was handed the red envelope for the runner up – the highly commended title: and with a drum roll from hundreds of feet… it went to Laura Wood for ‘The agency for scandal’. Huge applause from the floor! Then, the gold envelope and Chris announced the winner for 2024 is Ravena Guron for ‘This book kills’. Everyone cheered and clapped and Ravena was quite emotional as she accepted her award.
After some final thanks and presentations to the host Chris Bradford and Chris Riddell by Dominique Collins, librarian at Hurstpierpoint College and the main organiser for the event, all the students made their way to the Book Nook shop for their book buying, refreshments in the foyer and eventually to the Music Room to meet the authors and get their books signed.
It was a joyous and noisy end to a fabulous event, and huge thanks go to the schools and their librarians for participating, the SSBA Committee for all their hard work throughout the year in choosing the shortlist, and all the schools and their librarians for taking part. We look forward to seeing you all again next year!
