The Amazing Book Awards

Shoreham Academy, Kingston Lane, Shoreham-by-Sea, BN43 6YT

Email us at:

info@amazingbookawards.co.uk

Important Dates for Your Diary

Friday 20th June 2025 - The ABA Awards Night

Author title

Author Archive by The ABA Team

The ABA Team

The 2024 ABA Awards Night

Oh what a night!

Wow! What a night!!!

Huge thanks to all of our participating schools for running your book clubs, getting all the entries in for us and organising trips out to bring students to the award night! We had nearly 300 people join us at Shoreham Academy, 4 FANTASTIC authors and a whole SHED load of excited teenage readers!

 

In case you were not able to make it, we have uploaded a Winners folder to the ABA Schools Drive which currently has some snazzy posters!

Social media has been very busy this weekend with the Authors celebrating their wins and lots of lovely feedback from parents, librarians and students alike. #ABA2024

Thank you one and all! Here’s to 2025! If you have any suggestions for the VERY long list please get in touch. 

EMAIL: vdacosta@durring.com

 

And the winner was …

JOSH SILVER for HAPPYHEAD

HappyHead was by far the out and out winner this year with over 500 votes! We were really sad that Josh couldn’t join us on the night but he has sent us a brilliant video – it’s up on our Youtube channel now. 

I just want to say thank you. These things mean so much to me. Being given the opprotunity to have your book read by people and have people champion it. It’s amazing, and something I never really expected.

Josh Silver, June 2024

Jane Earley, Cavendish

Thanks A MILLION – as we say in Ireland – for another wonderful night on Friday.

Our pupils were ‘buzzing’ as one mother put it. They loved every minute!

Juliette Webb, Davison

 Congratulations for organising an amazing evening!

We all enjoyed it. The authors were so engaging.

John Clayton, Burgess Hill Academy

Thank you so much for a lovely time on Friday evening – our students had a terrific time. 

It was a terrific event and we are felt so privileged to be there!

The ABAs 2025

Save the Date

The ABA Team

The ABAs 2025 will be held in the brand new theatre space at Durrington High School on Friday 20th June 2025, and we can’t wait! We’re already planning some awesome things for you and your students and we are looking forward to seeing you there! You can sing-up to the ABAs 2025 using the link below.   

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 awards night on FRIDAY 21st JUNE? 

 

The Immortal Games

By Annalise Avery

How to Die Famous

By Benjamin Dean

Catch Your Death

By Ravena Guron

Someone is Watching You

By Tess James-Mackey

HappyHead

By Josh Silver

THE SHORTLIST

THE SHORTLIST

THE SHORTLIST

THE SHORTLIST

THE SHORTLIST

THE SHORTLIST

THE SHORTLIST

THE SHORTLIST

THE SHORTLIST

THE SHORTLIST

Join us on Friday 21st June for the BEST awards night yet!

link coming soon ….

Rosie Wins Gold!

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 Bronze.

Huge thanks to all our finalist authors for joining us at the award night, we hope you enjoyed the evening.

A BIG thank you to all of the staff and students who came along too. It was so FANTASTIC to see you face-to-face again after so long.

A final thanks to the Book Nook, Hove for your on-going support over the past 12 years. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

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.

We are looking forward to next year already!

Sarah

Librarian, Ardingly College

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 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

ABAs

The Home of the ABAs

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.

Join the Club!

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

 The ABA Team The 2024 ABA Awards Night Oh what a night! Wow! What a night!!! Huge thanks to all of our participating schools for running your book clubs, getting all the entries in for us and organising trips out to bring students to the award night! We had nearly...

 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...

Rosie Wins Gold!

 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...

The Shortlist is here!!

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.

The 2022 Long List is Here!

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’re BACK baby!!

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 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.

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.

SAVE THE DATE – FRIDAY 17TH JUNE 2022 FOR THE BIGGEST ABA AWARDS NIGHT YET!

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,

The 2021 Awards

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!

The Shortlists are Here!!

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.