Kelpies Prize 2008 -- the winner

Floris Books is delighted to announce that the winner of the Kelpies Prize 2008 was Tarantula Tide by Sharon Tregenza.

The winner was announced on August 25th 2008 at an award ceremony at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and was presented to Sharon by bestselling children's author Vivian French.

At the event, extracts from all three shortlisted books -- The Chesspiece Magician by Douglas Bruton, Crow by Lindsay McKrell and Tarantula Tide by Sharon Tregenza -- were read by Edinburgh-based children's author Vivian French, whose novel The Robe of Skulls is shortlisted for this year's Royal Mail Awards.

On announcing the winner, Vivian French presented Sharon Tregenza with a giant winners cheque for £2000. Tarantula Tide will be published by Floris books in the Kelpies series on 16 October 2008.

For more details, see the winner press release. Manuscripts were judged anonymously. They had to be set wholly or mainly in contemporary Scotland and may not have been previously commercially published.

Summary of Tarantula Tide
Smugglers. Vikings. Shetland should be a fascinating place for a holiday, but Jack is harbouring a secret and is less than enthusiastic to be there. Then he meets Izzie and her exotic pets and things soon start to get more interesting: Jack finds an unexpected visitor underneath the fridge; the wandering man is not what he seems, and each night a mysterious person waits on the beach outside Jack’s cottage. But what do all these have to do with an unusual visitor named Octavia?
Jack and Izzie unwittingly find themselves in the middle of a dangerous adventure, wondering what the next tide will bring to the land of the Viking Fire Festival.
Sharon Tregenza was born and grew up in Cornwall. She currently lives with her husband in an old mill house on the Welsh border. She has an MA in Creative Writing and has had almost four hundred stories, poems and articles published worldwide. One of her poems has been included in Pan Macmillan’s recent poetry anthology, There’s a Hamster in the Fast Lane. She was inspired to set her book on Shetland when her husband worked on the island and she fell in love with the warm people and varied wildlife.

Archive: July 2008: shortlist announced

All the entries for the 2008 Kelpies Prize have been read by our editorial team, and Floris Books is delighted to announce a shortlist of three books, which will all go forward to the award ceremony at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 25th:

• The Chesspiece Magician by Douglas Bruton
  Every year Corrie comes to Uig with his parents expecting to be bored for a whole two weeks. But on his first night looking for driftwood on the beach he meets Kat, who is full of stories and knows that Corrie has just found something important in the sand.
  Then the voices start; whispers in his head heralding the return of someone unknown. Is Corrie going mad? What do a mighty sea dragon and an ancient magician have to do with Kat and Corrie as they unearth a magical history that threatens to engulf the island? This year’s holiday will be anything but dull.
  Douglas Bruton has studied at both the University of Aberdeen and Edinburgh College of Art, where he first started to write. In the last two years his work has been recognised in over forty writing competitions across the UK and he has been published in many anthologies and magazines. Douglas currently works as a teacher at a high school near Edinburgh and in 2005 was voted Forth One’s Teacher of the Year.
  
  
• Crow by Lindsay McKrell
  Whatever Lewis Crow had expected from his new life in Stirling, he had not anticipated the Home for Waifs and Strays next door to his own house. Full of gifted children and misfits with peculiar talents, Lewis finds himself absorbed into a strange household of oddballs. Life takes an unexpected turn when he discovers an ancestor he had never heard of and an inheritance he could not have imagined.
  But others are also tracing his family history, wanting to stop the prophecy that Lewis seems to embody. Can the Gifted overcome the Unbelievers? Set against the dramatic backdrop of Stirling Castle, this will keep you guessing until the Pirate House reveals its secrets.
  Lindsay McKrell studied French and Russian at the University of Edinburgh. She lived in France, Bulgaria and Belgium before returning to Scotland and now works as a librarian in Stirling. Several of Lindsay’s poems have been published and her plays have been performed in locations throughout Scotland. Crow is her first novel.
  
  
• Tarantula Tide by Sharon Tregenza
  Smugglers. Vikings. Shetland should be a fascinating place for a holiday, but Jack is harbouring a secret and is less than enthusiastic to be there. Then he meets Izzie and her exotic pets and things soon start to get more interesting: Jack finds an unexpected visitor underneath the fridge; the wandering man is not what he seems, and each night a mysterious person waits on the beach outside Jack’s cottage. But what do all these have to do with an unusual visitor named Octavia?
  Jack and Izzie unwittingly find themselves in the middle of a dangerous adventure, wondering what the next tide will bring to the land of the Viking Fire Festival.
  Sharon Tregenza was born and grew up in Cornwall. She currently lives with her husband in an old mill house on the Welsh border. She has an MA in Creative Writing and has had almost four hundred stories, poems and articles published worldwide. One of her poems has been included in Pan Macmillan’s recent poetry anthology, There’s a Hamster in the Fast Lane. She was inspired to set her book on Shetland when her husband worked on the island and she fell in love with the warm people and varied wildlife.

Congratulations to the three shortlisted writers. For more details, see the shortlist press release (PDF, 350k).

Manuscripts were judged anonymously. They had to be set wholly or mainly in contemporary Scotland and may not have been previously commercially published.

Kelpies Prize 2009

The 2009 Kelpies Prize has now been launched. As usual, the deadline for manuscript submissions is 28 February (2009) and the guidelines and regulations are the same as in previous years: we are looking for books for children aged roughly 9-12 years old, set wholly or mainly in Scotland, which are previously unpublished. Get writing now!

• 2009 Application Form
• 2009 Guidelines for authors
• 2009 Terms and Conditions

About the Kelpies series
The Kelpies imprint boasts such well-known Scottish children's authors as Kathleen Fidler and Mollie Hunter. Since Floris Books acquired the list in 2001, we have reissued over twenty-five books in the Young Kelpies (for seven to ten-year-olds) and Classic Kelpies (for nine to twelve-year-olds) series, including Theresa Breslin's Bullies at School, Lavinia Derwent's Sula series, Mollie Hunter's A Stranger Came Ashore and Kathleen Fidler's The Desperate Journey. Floris has also published twelve new books in the Kelpies series:

• The Chaos Clock by Gill Arbuthnott
• The Chaos Quest by Gill Arbuthnott
• Winterbringers by Gill Arbuthnott
• Kelpies Prize 2005 winner Catscape by Mike Nicholson
• Chill by Alex Nye (winner of the Royal Mail Awards for Scottish children's books 2007, 8-11 year old category
• Dragonfire by Anne Forbes
• The Witches' Mark by Donald Lightwood
• The Cat Who Decided by Margaret Forrester
• First Aid for Fairies and Other Fabled Beasts Lari Don
• Hox by Annemarie Allan (shortlisted for the Royal Mail Awards for Scottish children's books 2008, 8-11 year old category
• The Wings of Ruksh by Anne Forbes
• The Underground City by Anne Forbes