It’s such an amazing list (pun intended)!! Thank you to everyone who voted for it, we couldn’t be happier with your final five.

So now you have until the 27th May to read and vote for your favourite! Have a look in our “How to Vote” section if you need a reminder.

Then you need to “save the date” and join us, either in person or via the zoomie-zoom on Friday 17th June for the ABA Awards Night.

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!

Good afternoon!

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 13^th 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 11^th 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.

If you have not joined us before, or have subscription enquiries, please contact Rachel Johnson rachel.johnson@shoreham-academy.org

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!

Not signed up yet this year? Follow this link: 2022 ABA Subscription Form

Warmest wishes,

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

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.