We are absolutely delighted to announce the 2024 Amazing Book Awards Shortlist, and what a list it is! Wow!! What do you think? Did your favourite make the shortlist? Have you started reading them yet?
And will you be joining us for the awards night on FRIDAY 21st JUNE?
Sign-up for 2024 is already open! Click the link above and get ready for 2024 and out 13th Birthday!
I just wanted to say how fantastic the ABA was this year. Our pupils had such a good time! It was so well organised, and the authors gave such good talks (hearing their origin stories was so much better than when they just read from their books!)- they were all articulate, funny and inspirational speakers.
This year the votes were SO close we had to choose six books instead of our normal five! It’s going to be a bumper year!
Save the date - Friday 16th June
Save the Date
Get your glad rags ready!
We are so excited about the awards night this year and should have BIG announcement for you soon. In the meantime we are absolutely delighted that Liz Kessler, 2022 Gold Award Winner, will be returning to be our wonderful host.
A reminder about us
The ABAs
Student Voice is KEY
Voted for by the readers
Established in 2011 by four West Sussex School Librarians the Amazing Book Awards, aka The ABAs, were created to give local students a strong personal voice. The first essential rule of the awards was, only the students’ votes count. No panel could override or veto their decisions. Student voice is key. The cornerstone of the awards.
It’s personal!
Established in 2011 by four West Sussex School Librarians the Amazing Book Awards, aka The ABAs, were created to give local students a strong personal voice. The first essential rule of the awards was, only the students’ votes count. No panel could override or veto their decisions. Student voice is key. The cornerstone of the awards.
The fastest growing book awards in the South East
Join an Online Community of over 3000 Readers
Follow us on our Socials and tell us what you think about finalists this year. @SussexABA
Established in 2011 by four West Sussex School Librarians the Amazing Book Awards, aka The ABAs, were created to give local students a strong personal voice. The first essential rule of the awards was, only the students’ votes count. No panel could override or veto their decisions. Student voice is key, it’s the cornerstone of our awards.
Subscriptions for the 2023 awards are still open, and even though we have announced the Long List there is still plenty of time to vote for the 2023 Shortlist! Who will win? Only our students can decide.
Join
Be part of the fastest growing book awards on the South Coast.
Read
Read some of the very best YA fiction out in the UK right now.
Meet
Join us for the awards night 2023 and meet the finalists.
Club Blog
Mar 15, 2024
ABA 2024 The 2024 Shortlist We are absolutely delighted to announce the 2024 Amazing Book Awards Shortlist, and what a list it is! Wow!! What do you think? Did your favourite make the shortlist? Have you started reading them yet? And will you be joining us for the...
About Rosie Talbot wins GOLD! We are delighted to announce that the wonderful Rosie Talbot is your Gold Award Winner. Sixteen souls was a clear winner but Finn Longman’s The Butterfly Assassin and Alex Bell’s The Lighthouse were a super close Silver and...
Mar 9, 2023
The Shortlist is Announced It’s here!! The 2023 Shortlist This year the votes were SO close we had to choose six books instead of our normal five! It’s going to be a bumper year! Save the date - Friday 16th June Save the Date Get your glad rags ready!...
We are delighted to announce the 2022 Amazing Book Awards Long List, and what a list it is! There were so many wonderful and exiting titles to choose from this year and try as we might we just couldn’t get it down to just 15 books. So we’ve cheated and gone for 19!
The List:
Ace of Spades by Faridah Abike-Iyimide
A Different sort of Normal by Abigail Balfe
Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen
The Soul Hunters by Chris Bradford
Afterlove by Tanya Byrne
What we are Scared of by Keren David
Furious Thing by Jenny Downham
The Upper World by Femi Fadugba
The Outrage by William Hussey
Green Rising by Lauren James
The World Between Us by Sarah Ann Juckes
When the World Was Ours by Liz Kessler
Splinters of Sunshine by Patrice Lawrence
Grow by Luke Palmer
Lock the Doors by Vincent Ralph
Smashed by Andy Robb
The Summer we Turned Green by William Sutcliffe
The Revelry by Katherine Webber
The Infinity Files by S. M. Wilson
And we are beyond delighted to announce that the AMAZINGLY BRILLAINT Simon James Green will be our host!
We
are thrilled to get in touch with you about the first phase of this years’
Amazing Book Awards! Following on from our virtual award event last year, we
are really looking forward to the chance to meet in person again and give all
of our readers an opportunity to meet the authors at this Summer’s awards
night, as things used to be!
Firstly
we want to say a big thank you to all of you for supporting us and staying on
board with the strange covid times that we have had and the impact it had on
the awards events. As promised, if you paid last years’ subscription, you are
automatically enrolled in the 2022 programme, no questions asked. We have set
up a google drive folder where we will again post all the resources as we
create them. We will message out as we add items in, for those who do not have
access to google drive.
We
want to share the timeline for this year’s programmes, so that you can plan
accordingly:
As you can see, there are lots of important dates coming up, and we’d love for
you all to be as involved as possible.
The first 2 events are key to ensure that we have a brilliant selection of titles that our readers are interested in and will enjoy on our long list, before they vote for the short list. If you and your readers have any recommendations of titles to add to the Long List, please can we have these by Monday 13th December.
We
will share the provisional long list with participating schools before the
Christmas holiday break. This will be in advance of a meeting for those that
can attend (virtually or physically) on Tuesday 11th January, where
we will collectively discuss these with your book group as to the titles they
would like to see on the official long list in advance of this meeting. We do
not expect you or your students to have read the books at this point, but
obviously feedback from those that have read them is incredibly useful!
We will mainly be looking for what your readers what they think of the blurb of
the books, if they are not engaged from the outset, this may be enough to make
the difference as to what makes the final cut (usually around 20 titles).
We
will follow up with more detail as we go through the year, but do feel free to
contact any of us if you have more questions.
Any
school resource enquires or general questions, please contact Sally Baker sbaker@durring.com
Any
social media or publisher contact queries, please contact Viv Dacosta vdacosta@durring.com
In
order for a book to qualify for this years’ awards, they should fit the
following criteria:
The books must be published between the 1st February 2021 and 31st January 2022.
The books must be in paperback for the first time in the UK.
It must also be either the first in a series or a stand-alone novel and they need be aimed at students in secondary school. (14+ years)
We have asked publishers to submit qualifying titles too, so we often end up with a VERY long provisional list for us to trim to our official long list. Please do share comments from your readers with us to ensure we do get the books that our students will be most excited to find on the final long list. You can share these with us at the Hive Mind meeting in January or share them with us in advance so we can include them on the information spreadsheet that we share with participating schools.
Thank
you so much for your ongoing support and enthusiasm. It’s so fantastic to work
with people so active in engaging young readers. You all rock!
Wow!! Where do we start. Okay, so we know 2020 and (if we’re honest) 2021 haven’t exactly been the best few years. But, hay, the ABAs are still going strong, and that’s all down to you guys. You have made these awards what they are, without you all we would be nothing. Thank you for sticking with us. We promise 2022 will be our BIGGEST celebration of the written word yet. Get ready to have your eyeballs dazzled with the shear volume of creative stuff coming your way.
Much love, The ABA Team x
So without further ado, here are your 2020 and 2021 winners!!
2020
Bronze – Viper
Silver – Alex in Wonderand
Gold – A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder
2021
Bronze – The Deathless Girls
Silver – Blood Moon
Gold – Black Flamingo
We hope you are as happy with your winners as we are. We hope you have a fantastic summer and we’ll see you all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in September as we launch the ABAs 2022!
We are absolutely thrilled with the wide range of titles that have been nominated this year, and we really hope you are too. Keep following us o all the social media feeds @SussexABA, and tell us what you think.
Info on the virtual awards night coming very soon.
Afternoon to all you lovely
Amazing Book Awards people! We hope that you are staying well and safe in all
this pandemic horribleness.
We are really pleased to
share news of the #ABA2021 award longlists with you- yes, I did say long LISTS!
As we had a fallow year last year we have a long list for both 2020 titles as
well as 2021 titles. You will find images of the long lists for each of these
attached, and we have recorded a
loom video introducing all of these that you are free to use at your
setting.
Due to covid current
restrictions and awareness that our usual award ceremony may well be impacted
by social distancing policies, we have taken the decision to run this year’s
events entirely online. We will be streaming the awards announcements along
with author interviews and students introductions online on Award Night (Friday
18th June) so everyone can participate regardless of what the covid
situation may be by then.
We will still produce all the
resources/labels/activities that we usually do, and we will look to you to help
connect your readers to the ABA books too and get them engaged with the usual
competitions and events. We are aware that everyone’s situation is strange
right now, with many of us having very limited ways to connect with our
readers, so initial long to shortlist voting will be done via our social media
sites.
#ABA2020 titles will be voted
on in the week beginning 15th February
#ABA2021 titles will be voted
on the follow week, beginning 22nd February
Once all the votes have been
collated, we will announce the 2 shortlists on World Book Day, Thursday 4th
March. We are currently looking into how we can get students who have read all
the shortlist books to vote via a more controllable system than social media!
We will ask you to help encourage those readers to use the voting system when
we get there.
One final bit of good news
for all you wonderful people, we feel that – due to how this year’s events are
going to mean working and celebrating in a different way – we are offering all
those subscribed to this year’s awards free membership to next year’s awards.
We wanted to say thank you to you all for sticking with us through the pandemic
and continuing all the hard work to keep your readers engaged with their
reading, not just the ABA’s but across the board.
Looking forward to catching
up soon, do get in touch with any of us for more clarity, or if you need
anything ABA related!