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Floris Books 15 Harrison Gardens Edinburgh EH11 1SH Scotland, UK Tel: 0131-337 2372 Fax: 0131-347 9919 The Kelpies Prize is supported by the 
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Floris Books 15 Harrison Gardens Edinburgh EH11 1SH Scotland, UK Tel: 0131-337 2372 Fax: 0131-347 9919 The Kelpies Prize is supported by the
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Kelpies Prize 2009 -- all submissions are in
The deadline of 28th February 2009 for the Kelpies Prize 2009 has come and gone, and all submissions are in. We're delighted at the response -- the prize seems to grow in reputation every year -- and our editors are busy reading the manuscripts. Watch this space for the shortlist announcement in early summer.
Further success for 2008 winner
Our 2008 winner, Sharon Tregenza, has been enjoying further success recently. Her novel Tarantula Tide has been nominated for the prestigious Branford Boase Award for first novelists.
In addition, Sharon had a hair-raising time at Edinburgh Zoo where she met youngsters from two local primary schools, as well as a very friendly spider! Photographs and more details are on the Scottish Booktrust website.
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.
Success for other Kelpies Prize shortlisted authors
It's not only our winning authors who get all the glory either! Lari Don, a runner-up in the 2007 Kelpies Prize, has had her novel, First Aid For Fairies and Other Fabled Beasts nominated for the Branford Boase award for first novelists as well. The sequel, Wolf Notes and Other Musical Mishaps, will be published in July 2009 and Lari will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival for the second year running.
Floris Books is also pleased to announce that Douglas Bruton's book The Chess Piece Magician, a runner-up in the 2008 Kelpies Prize, will be published this autumn. Douglas is a veteran of writing competitions and has had pieces published in numerous anthologies and magazines, but this is his first published novel. He currently works as a teacher in a high school near Edinburgh (in 2005 he was voted Forth One's Teacher of the Year!) so we're looking forward to being out and about with him promoting the book in the autumn term.
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: