This is the inaugural year of our Georgina Hawtrey-Woore Award for Independent Authors. Georgina died, too young, in 2017. As a senior editor at Arrow, Georgina was determined that her authors should fulfil their potential, and, more, she was also a great supporter of WforW. To commemorate her life, we three grannies who run Words for the Wounded determined that Georgina should be honoured. To this end we renamed the competition and re-jigged its structure. So now we have four categories.
Today we are featuring the 1st and 2nd Place winners of the Fiction for Young Adults category.
Fiction for Young Adults
It was a close run thing between first and second place but in the end – unanimous.
1st Place: The Kelpie’s Eyes – Oliver Eade
The Kelpie’s Eyes is an extraordinarily good fantasy novel of sisters standing firm against dark and determined forces which intrude into their time slip world.
The novel opens in the stinking streets of Victorian Glasgow, so starkly portrayed that you smell and taste them, as well as feel the the fear of the hunted orphan. We almost become Mairi, as she attempts to evade discovery, only to be subsumed into a time warp, or is it the present day Caitlin who is subsumed into Mairi’s world?
Judges’ Comments: This fantasy is a complex story, at times dark, but is so well-handled that it grips throughout. This is due in part to the author’s grasp of show not tell, so that the settings are vivid and empathetic, but also because there is such clarity of structure that the pace and tension never wavers or becomes confusing.
We are indeed in good hands as Oliver Eade builds the tension, the questions, the warmth, the fear, sometimes to almost unbearable heights. It is exciting, and moving, and clever as the power struggle between the sinister gnomes and the fearsome Kelpie is played out.
A most worthy winner. Bravo. So let’s hear more about the winner, Oliver Eade, and the inspiration behind The Kelpie’s Eyes
Oliver Eade – including the Texan sisters – Lucia and Beatriz – who inspired the book
And to whom it is dedicated. .
Oliver, a Scottish doctor, has written over a hundred short stories, published as Lost Whispers & other stories. His debut children’s novel, Moon Rabbit, was a winner of the WAAYB 207 New Novel Competition its sequel, Monkey King’s Revenge, a children’s category finalist for The People’s Book Prize. Both link present day Scotland to mythological China.
He has published novels for young readers, teens and adults. Whilst his novels for the young are mostly in the fantasy genre, his mainstream adult writing is set in the real world. Oliver’s debut adult novel, A Single Petal, winner of the 2012 Local Legend Competition, is based in ancient China, his wife being Chinese. With family in Texas, some of his novels for younger readers, inspired by Native mythology, are set in North America.
Oliver has also written twelve plays, one a runner-up winner in an international one act playwriting competition. Another, The Gap, inspired by the writer being caught up in an earthquake in 2008, was staged in 2012. He has led writing workshops for children in Scotland and elsewhere.
Apart from writing, his main passion is for street photography. He gives talks on photography as well as on aspects of writing.
Oliver Eade tells us:
Inspiration for The Kelpie’s Eyes came from taking my two Texan granddaughters, in the rain, to see The Grey Mare’s Tail Waterfall, one of Scotland’s highest, made me wonder whether its name had been inspired by the legendary Scottish ‘kelpie’, a dark horse spirit. From this, and the girls’ sisterly love, was born The Kelpie’s Eyes.
The sisters in the novel, Caitlin and Rhona, are also close but different, and sibling rivalry takes hold where a handsome woodcutter’s son is concerned. My own love of ‘losing myself in a novel’ inspired the idea of Caitlin becoming Mairi, the Victorian Glaswegian teenager in the book she had to abandon when her father insisted she join them on a walk beside the Grey Mare’s Tail. And my granddaughters’ sisterly love was behind the younger girl’s desire to seek out the land beyond the waterfall to find Caitlin.
Like a literary babushka doll, there’s a story within the Glaswegian’s girl’s story. Orphan Mairi (also Caitlin) believes she’s really the fairy-tale princess of a picture book that she’d kept hidden in the poorhouse she escaped from. I wanted this magical fairy-tale land to contrast with the bleakness of life for children forced to work in a Victorian poorhouse. The kelpie, victim of an even greater evil, Auld Clootie, needs Mairi for her eyes and soul, with which he hopes to extend his domain beyond the confines of the fairy-tale land.
The story, good versus evil, travels through these different dimensions as Rhona and the woodcutter’s son, a true fairy-tale prince, fight to save the bookworm-turned-orphan-turned princess.
As well as from reading about Scottish myths and legends, I found inspiration from the magical realism of some Latin-American writers, such as Isabel Allende’s ‘City of the Beasts’.
Oliver Eade will be writing A Day in the Life for Frost Magazine shortly.
The Kelpie’s Eyes: paperback or e-book. pub. Mauve Square Publishing.
Available from: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kelpies-Eyes-Oliver-EADE-ebook/dp/B00KK2COCU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1528376472&sr=8-1&keywords=Oliver+eade+The+Kelpies+eyes
www.olivereade.co.uk
And now on to 2nd Place
High Spirits by Rob Keeley
Here we have a novel, High Spirits, with a rapid pace, a dollop of humour and a time slip, this time back into the 1930s where a crime must be prevented.
Judges’ Comments: One of a series, the author handles the backstory well, so that we are effortlessly brought up to date with Ellie’s past, as she weaves through her present. We are made aware of the existing tensions between her parents before Ellie has to return to Inchwood Manor, which is where she is dragged into another dimension.
Imaginative, energetic, this is part fantasy part crime novel. Good fun, many twists and turns, and with excellent period and political detail.
Let’s hear more about it from Rob.
Rob was born in Merseyside. As a wheelchair user, the authorities placed him in a special school, aged three. Rob, however had other ideas. He worked his way up to mainstream schooling, college and then university, gained a degree in Law and qualified as a barrister amongst other things.
His first children’s book, The Alien in the Garage and Other Stories, was published in 2011. The Dinner Club and Other Stories, was longlisted for the International Rubery Book Award. The 1st in the 4 book Spirits series, Childish Spirits, gained him a Distinction for his MA in Creative Writing before being longlisted for the Bath Children’s Novel Award and nominated for the People’s Book Prize in 2015. The 2nd, The Spirit of London, was Highly Commended for the Independent Author Book Award in 2016.
He has written for the BBC – Chain Gang and Newsjack for Radio 4 Extra. He recently studied Screenwriting and Film making, and was a judge for the IGGY and Litro Young Writers’ Prize. He is a Patron of the Children’s Media Foundation. His books have been used in schools, libraries and at literary festivals and he is in demand for his author workshops, which one teacher even described as “inspirational”!
Rob tells us: I’m delighted that High Spirits has achieved second place in the Fiction for Young Adults category. It’s the fourth in my series of ghostly time travel tales and is based around 1936 and the abdication crisis – a period I wanted to tackle as I don’t know of it being dealt with in a novel for this age group before. I did much research into Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. The fun came from two shape-changing spirits impersonating them!
In studying World War Two at school, young people may not realise just how many people in this country in the 1930s supported Hitler. The themes covered – racism, anti-Semitism and the rise of the Right – seem worryingly relevant again today and I wanted to make young people aware of the dangers they can bring.
A Day in Rob’s life will be published on Frost Magazine in due course, but in the meantime:
For more information about Rob, visit www.robkeeley.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @RobKeeleyAuthor.
Rob’s books are available on: https://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Spirits-4-Rob-Keeley/dp/1788036158/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1528373204&sr=1-6
Publisher: https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/young-adult/high-spirits/