Marlborough LitFest Love Books Competition Past Winners

Marlborough LitFest launched its Love Books competition in 2020, in association with English at Bath Spa University, in order to celebrate the power of reading to shift perceptions and to open up opportunities. This national competition invites participants to explain their choice of a favourite book, poem or play by either a written (up to 750 words) or video (no more than four minutes) response. The emphasis needs to be on what entrants love about their chosen read and why they think others should try it. The competition is open to three age groups: 13-16 years, 17-19 years and 20 years and above.

PAST LOVE BOOKS COMPETITION WINNING ENTRIES:

2024 WINNERS & RUNNERS-UP

13 – 15s WINNER

A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder – Holly Jackson
By Kirsten Thomas

I’ve always loved reading, every time I read a new book I’m like “Oh my gosh I love this, this is definitely my favourite” but then I read another book and I’m like “Ugh, I love this so so much”. Two books, however, have really stuck with me: The Summer I Turned Pretty and A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder, which funny enough both have a tv series for them. Things from A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder (Agggtm for future reference) have definitely stuck in my brain more than The Summer I Turned Pretty.

Agggtm is all the rage at the moment. The series is coming out soon and so you might think that I’m just following a trend, and at first I thought I was. I remember thinking “Oh everyone seems to really love this, let’s read it” then I read it and was blown away. The writing is beyond amazing and honestly above any other I’ve read before.

The person that keeps this plot thickening; a very enthusiastic and academic school girl whose name is Pippa-Fitz Amobi (the protagonist) an A-level student who is working on the closed case of Andie Bell and Sal Singh who were at the time together.  Well they never broke up because they both died before they could even try, yikes.  Andie Bell goes missing on the 20th of April and a search party is sent out immediately. Being the small town of “little Kilton” missing cases are unusual.  Andie’s never found, but evidence is and there isn’t much of it. First off they find that she was meant to be picking her parents up from a party but never arrived and so the first round of evidence comes from family, friends and any immediate contacts. Not much information is found there apart from a significant lead, Sal (Salil) Singh who was at a “calamity party”. He left at 10:30 and returned home at 12:00. Odd. And on the same night his girlfriend went missing. Suspicious…  After they learn this fact they find Andie’s car, a black Peugeot.
It has her blood in the boot and on the steering wheel with Sal’s finger prints on it which makes him the obvious killer, right? Well, Pippa doesn’t think so. The police decide to revisit it once they have more backing evidence but don’t have the time to, as the next morning Sal is found dead just outside the woods. An autopsy is preformed; he committed suicide, took a ton of his dad’s insomnia pills, tied a plastic bag around his head and dies of suffocation. I personally don’t think this is suicide, I think it was by another person (maybe the not so dead Andie Bell… just a thought). Pippa, thinking this, indulges in an investigation to close this case once and for all and she does it for her EPQ school project.

I love this book for so many reasons. The no.1 New York Times best seller Agggtm by Holly Jackson has left its mark on me and by the sounds of reviews many others. This is my favourite book for so many reasons. One of them is that the writing style is unmatched; Holly manages to give just the right balance of how Pippa’s feeling through all of this and Ravis (her consulted partner in crime) but she also throws you into the story, which is something I think most people like as a reader. Making you feel like you’re reliving the crimes even though you weren’t there in the first place, she truly takes you back in time to somewhere you’ve never been before. It makes you feel like a detective reading the books like “OMG THIS RELATES TO THAT” and “Ohhh that’s what happened there”. It’s one of the most mesmerising things I’ve ever read. I’m proud of Holly for writing this and I don’t even know her. Once you pick her book up it can’t be put down.

If anyone ever came up to me saying “do you think I should read this” I would 100% say yes, without a doubt. And I mean who would put a note like “Stop digging Pippa” in her sleeping bag. Want to find out who?  So do I. Let’s read.

13-15s RUNNER-UP

The Silent Patient – Alex Michaelides  
By Eve Jacobs

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a silent person by any stretch of the word, which led me to pick up The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides perhaps slightly ironically. However, I am truly so thankful that my friend recommended it to me (thank you, Thea) as it is by far one of the best novels I have read.

Initially, I was not completely taken by the idea of the storyline; a successful woman living with her successful husband in an area of London where successful people live seemed a bit typical, but then she shoots her husband in the head five times. Immediately I was taken aback and consumed by interest and questions. What were her motives? Why such a sudden change of character? What did her husband do? Why does she refuse to speak? Can she even speak? I suppose I have the author to thank for such an intriguing overview, and I will admit that I am partial to a novel recommended by The Sunday Times. So, I started reading.

I will admit that it took me a good few chapters to really get ‘stuck in’ to the novel, but the pace quickly sped up. I grew attached to the piece-by-piece description of the events from the narrator’s perspective, and his detailed accounts of his own chaotic and traumatic childhood. Theo Faber was a remarkably interesting character to me, as he seemed to be inexplicably obsessed with Alicia, the ‘Silent’ woman who murdered her husband but also had a very alarming – and sad – upbringing which made me wonder if he had some connection with her, her husband, or her family?

Part two of the novel was Alicia’s diary. Great! I had thought. Some answers! But unfortunately, I was kept at the edge of my seat. She talks about a heatwave, dinner with her husband, and how they love each other. They seemed strangely normal…

The novel continued to tease details and give hints about the truth, but then seemed to push another truth entirely. I thoroughly enjoyed how deceiving the characters appeared to be but honestly also found them frustrating at times as they were unreliable and were difficult to dissect.

The typical ‘plot twist’ moment shook me. It seemed unbelievable and yet perfectly clear, and somehow changed my entire perception of the novel. As a reader, I value most the ability of a writer to make me think and challenge my views and ideas. This novel certainly did all those things and left me puzzling for days afterwards about what it is about someone that makes them trustworthy or dependable. Some part of me was weirdly hurt as I felt I had been deceived by the narrator, but that is why I found it so engrossing. I think a good book changes the way you understand or receive other people just slightly. This novel taught me to look at every viewpoint and question every motive.

Having finished this read, I spent the next week raving about it to anyone who would listen (my friends can attest to this) and managed to hook a few people onto it. Even my fantasy-romance-loving friend was persuaded to give it a go, and she loved it!

16-19s WINNER

Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
By Eleanor Harvey

‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…’ This opening sentence of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic masterpiece Rebecca is probably one of the most famous lines in literature. Without reading the novel, it is perhaps hard to understand why. However, in just nine words, this sentence encapsulates all the traits which make du Maurier’s story of obsession so compelling and atmospheric.

‘Last night…’
It is certainly appropriate that these are Rebecca’s opening words, given the novel’s preoccupation with the past. The plot centres on the notably unnamed narrator’s obsession with her new husband Maxim de Winter’s notoriously gorgeous and charismatic late wife, Rebecca. A much younger, underconfident and naïve lady’s companion when she first meets and quickly marries Maxim, the narrator cannot escape the feeling that she will never live up to Rebecca’s legacy as the perfect wife who fit so neatly into the upper-class world the narrator is an outsider to. However, this is far from the only shadow the past casts over the characters. Du Maurier begins her novel at a distant future from the main storyline of the narrator’s early relationship with Maxim. Yet, despite this passage of time, du Maurier emphasises that the couple’s life is still entirely dictated by the past; they must live in various foreign hotels due to the fallout of the novel’s later events and never speak about what happened. Rebecca is therefore far from the only (non-literal) phantom haunting the text, with every action the characters take shaping their lives forever – usually for the worst.

‘…I dreamt…’
In telling us the narrator only ‘dreamt’ of Manderley, du Maurier foregrounds how much of the novel occurs in the narrator’s imagination. As readers, we see everything through the second Mrs de Winter’s eyes, and we must make our own judgements on what is real or paranoia. While she initially fantasises about her blissfully happy future with Maxim, her daydreams soon shift to images of Rebecca provoked by the small but insidious reminders of her perfection she finds everywhere. Her life is gradually taken over by a woman who has been rendered angelic by death, but who is in so many ways still living. However, du Maurier does not merely show us the narrator’s fears of inadequacy as she falls ever deeper into her corrosive obsession. Instead, she reels the reader into this same trap, as we constantly attempt to decode the puzzle of Rebecca’s real life. Then, just as we think we are close to understanding, du Maurier turns everything upside down in one of the most memorable plot twists ever committed to page. Only then can we look back on all the hints we misinterpreted and recognise that we should have realised the truth all along.

‘…I went to Manderley again.’
What, then, of the central phrase of du Maurier’s opening sentence? Well, Manderley – Maxim’s famously beautiful home – is arguably the novel’s true protagonist, earning pages of description before Maxim or even Rebecca is mentioned. Even when accepting Maxim’s marriage proposal, the narrator’s first thought is not of love, but of living there. Manderley becomes so much more than a house: it is a symbol of status and acceptance which initially seem so unattainable to the gauche narrator, and increasingly blurs – as everything does – into the narrator’s image of Rebecca. Manderley is Rebecca’s house, full of Rebecca’s things: her dogs, her writing desk, her bedroom – and her husband. It is also the realm of Mrs Danvers, the iconic creepy housekeeper, whose obsession with Rebecca outdoes even the narrator’s own. From du Maurier’s first mention of Mrs Danvers, she sends a chill down our spine through her uncanny ability to see into the narrator’s mind, confirming all her worst fears of inferiority. It is no wonder, then, that Manderley becomes a ghost itself, haunting the narrator’s dreams even when she believes she has escaped her old demons.

Few among us will marry strangely taciturn multimillionaires with famous stately homes and notorious ex-wives, but that doesn’t save us from being pulled into the same traps as our narrator. As we read, we too are haunted yet seduced by the evasive Rebecca, the terrifying Mrs Danvers, and the charismatic but cold Maxim as we try to work out what’s really going on. It is an often unbearably claustrophobic interrogation of love, class, nostalgia, obsession, psychological manipulation, and above all of the past, which we can neither recapture nor truly escape. And the plot twist’s pretty good as well.

16-19s RUNNER-UP
In Memoriam – Alice Winn
By Mia Pitts

At seventeen when you are faced with condensing yourself into a university application, your name tied to numbers and letters of attainment, there is respite in the daydream of being recognised for all the subtleties mere grades could never encapsulate. Love offers itself as the scope through which we may be seen in our entirety.

I am yet to read a more escapist depiction of this magical ability of love than that of Alice Winn’s In Memoriam. Ripped from the smallness of their public boarding school, Gaunt and Ellwood find solace in one another amidst the gruelling reality of World War 1. Their greatest fear is not to be shot by a Fritz, but rather to fall too deeply for one another, when at any moment they may be separated by division or death. The soft intimacy of their affection juxtaposes vivid descriptions of the endless, futile deaths around them; it is perhaps a testament to the power of love that such a beautiful story of connection could possibly exist alongside one of such monstrous conflict.

A Level history has taught me to memorise. Without hesitation I could list the dates of various battles, the contents of letters sent from leader to leader, the figures of lives lost and pounds spent on artillery – yet In Memoriam has taught me to see the stories that lie beneath the statistics. Now when a previously sterile number of casualties appears on the whiteboard at school, I see flickers of life between the digits. The line in my textbook that talks of soldiers enlisting as a result of propaganda spills off the page as Gaunt enlists to escape his terrifying feelings about Ellwood. My notes on the locations of divisional rest pulse with the night they spent together in an abandoned château ‘somewhere in France’. Barren facts become portals to the lives that made them a reality, and it is through this book that I have been reminded of why I chose to study history in the first place.

Alice Winn’s presentation of a homosexual love is delicate. Sometimes rough and shameful, sometimes gentle and earnest – but always unequivocally human. Explaining in an interview how she spoke with her ‘male friends who are gay or bisexual’ to ensure Gaunt and Ellwood’s encounters were relatable, Winn demonstrates what I believe to be a fundamental argument of the topical debate as to whether or not writers should write outside of their own experience: telling a story you have not lived can give way to essential empathy and understanding.

Ellwood reaches to poets such as Tennyson and Shakespeare to make sense of the world of pain and confusion around him. Through this Winn reminds us of the transcendent and extraordinary role of a good writer – somebody to look to when we cannot articulate what we are burning to express. As teenagers today, growing into a world of unprecedented change, we arguably need such writers more than ever; in the same way Ellwood finds hope in one of his Tennyson quotes, we too are free to take from it what we may be searching for:

“Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At Last – far off- at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.”

20+ WINNER

Diary of a Provincial Lady – E M Delafield
By Kate Diamond

The similarities between myself and the eponymous Lady (unnamed throughout the novel) are, on paper, few and far between. We both have two children. End of list.

She lives in Great Depression era rural Devon, with a household staff, and a tennis court in the garden. Her eldest son attends boarding school on the south coast, and she attends dinner parties featuring distinguished artists and editors. None of these things are true of me.

And yet, no other literary character has so perfectly encapsulated my thoughts on socialising, marriage, raising children, picnics, the press, bananas, the role of aunts and uncles, and the state of my hair. One hundred years after the fact, every mundanity in every diary entry is my own.

We are both buried under the guilty weight of unanswered correspondence – hers letters, mine social media notifications and group chats.

We both have two good dress options that we alternate for social occasions – hers the Blue / Black-and-gold, mine the Blue with pink print / Low cut black.

We share a strong “homicidal impulse” when engaging with certain people who will stop at nothing to deny us a conversational win. Her – Lady B, me – that guy at work.

When agitated with her husband she often visits the divorce court in her mind. And I, well, I used to do that all the time, before I visited the divorce court in real life.
.
We are on a joint quest to achieve “stability of financial situation” – she writes to the bank, moving money between accounts to cover outstanding charges, while I regularly grant myself payday loans from my instant access savings account.

And our daily list of reminders: “Put evening shoes out of window to see if fresh air will remove smell of petrol”, and rhetorical questions: “Could I write a play myself? Could we all write plays, if only we had the time?” remain banished to the annuls of our minds, with little chance of ever being acted upon or answered.

As with any diary, the entries are built on mundanity. But, as with all the best fictional diarists – Cassandra Mortmain, Adrian Mole, Greg Heffley – we love them for their unique take on the every day. Provincial Lady is no exception.

After several weeks of mental negotiations, the pre-emptive undertaking of a host of domestic tasks, and a disastrous vomit-fuelled ferry crossing, she arrives in the South of France to spend a few days in the company of her dear friend Rose, who moves in altogether more glamorous circles.

Our Lady’s efforts to fit in here are a particular highlight, as she attempts to accompany the fanciest of all the holiday guests in swimming to a large rock in the middle of the sea. Having set off, she has the immediate revelation that she is not as strong a swimmer as she thought – “Long before we are half-way there, I know that I shall never reach it, and hope that Robert’s second wife will be kind to the children”.

Her agonisingly slow crawl through the sea towards the rock – contemplating the meaning of life, mentally selecting photographs for the newspaper articles on her death, while being repeatedly dragged underwater – is hysterical. She remains effusively polite throughout her near drowning, and eventually emerges onto the rock, bleeding heavily from the knee and blowing her nose into her hand, with the one aim of retaining what is left of her dignity. In a single page, Delafield has crafted the perfect tale – mild peril, the indignity of being worse than our peers at physical activities, the vanity of the mind (even in death), and the unfailing politeness of the British people.

Provincial Lady is laugh out loud funny, no doubt. But it is only when attempting to emulate her writing do I realise with quite how few words she can convey a thought, feeling or situation. Her ability of genuine comedic brevity is something I long to master.

Nonetheless, while I may not be able to emulate her, it is heartening to know her. In discovering the Provincial Lady, I discovered that my unending internal monologue cataloguing my shortcomings, asking pointless questions, and penning witty retorts hours after awkward exchanges are over, had lived a previous life in Great Depression era rural Devon.

I only wish this book were more widely known, so that more people could enjoy a similar revelation.

20+ RUNNER-UP

Foundation – Isaac Asimov
By Clare Diston

Sometimes a book finds you at just the right time – and sometimes you have to go looking for it.

About 10 years ago, I decided I wanted to read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. I don’t know where I’d heard about it, or why it was suddenly on my radar; I just knew it was a sci-fi classic and I desperately wanted a copy. For months, I looked in every bookshop I went into, but I couldn’t find it. Then one day, my housemate (who had no idea about my private book quest) came home with a copy, read it, hated it and gave it to me.

That book changed my life.

Foundation tells the story of the downfall of the Galactic Empire. In the far future, humans have settled millions of planets across the galaxy; the Empire has brought relative stability and prosperity to its members, but its time is nearly up. Hari Seldon, inventor of ‘psychohistory’, can predict the future by studying the behaviour of humans en masse. That’s why he knows the end of the Empire is coming, and that it will lead to decay, destruction and thousands of years of darkness for humanity. But he has also laid the foundations (geddit?) for a plan that will shorten the time before the next empire can be established, and thus save billions of lives.

The book is a series of snapshots, set many years apart. In each one, a different cast of characters faces a new crisis that threatens to plunge their planet, or the galaxy, into oblivion. It’ll take wit and cunning to overcome each crisis and set humanity on the path to peace again.

When I came to this book, I’d hardly read any sci-fi before. That’s because I’m an English Literature graduate, and while I loved my degree and will never regret having studied books for three years, the university syllabus had left me with some snobbishness about what ‘good literature’ is. Anything genre – science-fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, crime – had some value, but it was definitely a tier below the good stuff, the classics, the worthy literature. Fantasy could never be literary; science-fiction couldn’t possibly be great.

Foundation so caught my imagination that it opened up not only sci-fi to me, but also all those other books I’d dismissed as not being worthy for so many years. I loved the puzzle-box feel of each mini-story in Foundation: the setting up of the crisis, all hope seeming lost, the clever solution that removes the threat while also setting up for the next one. I loved the smart, know-it-all characters. I especially loved the galaxy-wide scope of the story and the sheer imagination Asimov brings to this world.

Of course, I can’t ignore the book’s problematic aspects: its lionisation of ’empire’ as a concept, or its lack of female characters, for example. These are things that crop up time and again in classic sci-fi, and it’s something you have to reckon with as a reader when you dig into the formative literature of any long-lasting genre. But even though it’s not a perfect book, for me it was a life-changing one.

Letting go of my ‘book snobbery’ and leaning into what I actually enjoy opened up worlds to me. I no longer think that genre fiction is ‘less’ than literary fiction. For a while after Foundation, I read sci-fi as a ‘guilty pleasure’; now it’s just a ‘pleasure’, because there’s no need to feel guilty for enjoying something that’s actually fantastic.

Reading sci-fi also made me want to write it myself, but when I started I quickly realised that I didn’t know enough science to write it convincingly – and so I signed up to study for a degree in Astronomy and Planetary Science. I’m two-thirds of the way through now, and I’ve already pivoted my day job towards being a science editor. I’ve worked on books about Mars and stars and the whole vast universe.

Foundation was my foundation – for a new passion, a new job and a new approach to life. It taught me to embrace what I enjoy and follow my interests wherever they lead.

I recommend that you read Foundation, because it’s a fun, clever space romp. But I also think you should pick up that book you’ve been thinking about reading, the one you’ve been told isn’t worth your time but that calls to you nevertheless.

It might just change your life.

2023 WINNERS & RUNNERS-UP

2022 13-16s WINNER

Astrid Wilson-Gignoux
Reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch

She sits (with her back to the window, her left foot resting on the bedpost below, her back curved like the arc of a wave) and reads. Every so often she stretches the crick in her neck, moves her hair from the dip between her eyes and the sloping bridge of her nose, and glances at the people passing on the street below. A dog has surreptitiously done what it shouldn’t have in the mud of the path (the owner is irritated but more anxious about the disparagement of his neighbour advancing towards them); a small, unprepossessing, boy in green khaki shorts is failing to fish his plastic buggy out of the stream. They are amusing but not consuming. Her protagonist – Dorothea – is far more nuanced in her disintegrating naivete, a far more lucrative prize to comprehend. So she returns to her book.

She is coming to the denouement and yet all is still written in tranquillity, with unfaltering precision. Words hang perfectly on Dorothea’s silken figure, following her every step without impeding her movement – without appearing masterful or painting her as a puppet. The entangled lives of Middlemarch run haphazardly through her hands – or through Eliot’s? She seems to feel the quicksand presence of fingers clasping a pen, dipping in ink, an enigmatic flick of magnanimous wrist at the decision to bring the two lost lovers together in the drawing room at that moment, to counteract Casaubon’s insensitive buffoonery with Will’s confusion and heartache, to delve into Mary Garth’s independence. The world dissolves at Eliot’s loom and is remade into a weave of such depth, of such integrity, of such detail. Will Ladislaw’s unthinking forays into the viper’s nest – that tumultuous couple Rosamond and Tertius Lydgate – are balanced with his amiability towards our own Dorothea (whose disastrous match with the out and out villain Casaubon is redeemed by her unflinching thirst for knowledge). We are not pushed to our limits as a reader, we are simply lead to the window and told what we don’t look hard enough to see on the everyday street.

Someone shouts downstairs and she straightens herself out. She has homework, violin practise, life, to be getting on with. But the image imprinted on her brain (of that woman staring with love at the hunched old man shrugging off the dawn and starting on his mountain of ploughing) is effervescent. She smiles. Only the greatest of writing can produce joy at the piecing together of a sentence. Not a word is out of place, or a scene misaligned. Middlemarch is real, Middlemarch is there hidden in the downs somewhere. `That scuffed old cover appears no more than a door to a different world.

2022 13-16s RUNNER-UP  Phoebe Taggart 

M  A X 

Just imagine, if you were in a fourteen-year-old girl’s body, being stripped in front of boys and girls aged four-sixteen, being held down, prodded against your will, nothing you could possibly do to stop it, that wouldn’t get you killed. Seems like a nightmare, well for many, it was reality.   

Max is a book set in World War Two, a story of a boy that starts off with him in the womb, ending with him around eleven years old.   

When I was reading Max, I felt as if I was part of the story. Like I was companions with Max and Lukas, that I went on their adventures, played their games, and went through their hardships alongside them.   

This book really changed my perspective on how the German children also suffered and were brought into this world thinking that Hitler was a caring, strong, and ‘good’ leader. He was in fact, none of those things. He was powerful and influenced many people but not in the way we see as right today. I really saw that many, many young children were harshly affected by World War Two.  

The chapter that really stuck with me, was where all the children, including adolescents. They had to strip naked and were poked and prodded, shaved and tattooed. Stripped from their privacy, identity, and self-confidence. Some were killed.   

In a way I feel like I relate to Lukas the most because he has many emotions and yet he can’t understand how express them. He also sees himself as the underdog, so he acts like he’s the best. He finds himself lonely at times, but Max always manages to pick his mood up. I admire him for his courage and willingness to do things dangerous and fearless when others don’t. Lukas puts others before himself and manages to pull it off in the most calm but powerful manner. I admire him for his selflessness, respect for others and playfulness, despite experiencing such a horrifying time.  

Even though this book was fiction, I really felt I learned so much and made me so aware of the horrors that many people were exposed to.   

M A  R I E  

the white walls,  

the painted plaster, peels.  

my arm hair stands up,  

i’m stood here. 

vulnerable.  

mama said this would never happen to me,  

papa said he would keep me safe.  

brother told me it would be okay.  

they were wrong.  

they’re dead,  

and now i’m stood here. 

vulnerable.  

screaming,  

crying.  

the sound of hard hands, slapping soft cheeks,  

gun shots.  

Disadvantaged.   

boys protesting*,   

but why?  

but how?  

i wish i had that courage,  

the courage to stand up to Hitler.  

disadvantage.  

i try to remember what mama told me,  

“be brave, stand up for you, don’t give up…”  

except, that’s not what she had said at all,  

“be quiet, do what they say, don’t talk back…”  

i close my eyes.  

i turn around to look at my brother for one last time,  

he smiled,  

he never smiles,  

unless something bad is about to happen.  

i close my eyes.  

i looked down at my soft skin,  

bare,  

bony,  

black.   

the colour of my stupid skin,  

the colour of his stupid skin,  

will kill us both.  

not a chance.   

the soldier takes one look,  

shoves me,  

pulls me,  

i can feel a cold metal barrel,  

pressing against my temple.  

this is it.  

i look up at all the other lifeless souls,  

staring into mine,  

their blonde hair and blue eyes,  

reflecting onto me,  

black hair and deep, dark brown eyes.   

this is it.  

pressure,  

seizes throughout my body,  

i can’t go yet,  

“i’m only a child”  

i scream at the top of my lungs,  

i’m only a child…  

————————————  

The white walls,  

The painted plaster, peels.  

Laying in my bed,  

I’m reading this,  

I’m Safe.   

Teacher said to read it,  

Papa said he didn’t care.  

Brother said it didn’t matter,  

Mama wasn’t there.  

And now I’m laying here,  

Vulnerable.  

As I read,  

I begin to imagine what it might be like,  

To not feel safe,  

To feel vulnerable,  

To be disadvantaged,  

To close my eyes and know there isn’t a chance,  

To know this is it,  

When I’m only a child.  

*Max and Lukas protested against the soldiers in the scene that this poem is based of (the same mentioned in the review.)  

2022 17-19s JOINT WINNER

Eleanor Flower
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

When I first read His Dark Materials, I was seven years old. It was a book my dad had suggested, and having eaten my way through the children’s section at the library, I decided to give it a shot. I was by no means a critical reader at this age, and though I adored the characters and universes Pullman had created, I put it back on the shelf with little more than the half-formed thought that I might one day read it again.
The second time I read His Dark Materials, I was twelve. Now a little older, I was a long way from the child who had initially devoured Will and Lyra’s whacky adventures, but still a child, nonetheless. Yet when I picked it up, it quickly became apparent that while it may have been the same book, it was by no means the same story I had read five years before. What had once been words I loved for their mystery became metaphors I could link to tangible knowledge. What I had once dismissed as meaningless technobabble became energised with my (albeit limited) scientific understanding and developing analytical skills. I became obsessed with the details of the physics, or ‘experimental theology,’ of their world and yearned to understand more, to reach those branches that were still just a little out of reach. So I finished the book and returned it, somewhat regretfully, to my shelf.

The third time I read His Dark Materials, I was fifteen. Now a GCSE student, my concept of literature and analysis had deepened still, and I was beginning to develop an appreciation not just for the stories I read, but their craft and symbolism. It is perhaps most significant that I had recently encountered the verse of William Blake, whose poems preface each chapter in the final novel of the trilogy. Something of his words half familiar, I once again fond my copy of His Dark Materials and began to reread. This time, I was utterly blown away.

In those brief years, Pullman’s story had truly come to life. His comments on theology, once unfathomable, now fascinated me with their wit and direction. His exploration of authority and fate evoked new questions I had never thought to ask before. I remember becoming fascinated by the Magisterium, the authority at the heart of Lyra’s world that enforces a perpetual childhood on citizens in order to prevent the corruption that ‘dust’ (sin) instigates during adolescence. But what really struck me was Pullman’s equation of sin not with evil, but with humanity. Throughout the trilogy, Pullman asserts that while exposure to ‘dust’ can cause great suffering, it also brings about immense joy. There is a duality to love and pain, and an understanding of that is what defines us as human beings, for it would be a far greater tragedy for a person to live free of both suffering and love, than to experience both. Life is flawed and finite, but without knowledge of that, how are we meant to appreciate what we have? If we spend our lives never questioning the nature of paradise, how can we tell heaven from hell?

However, the true genius of the story comes not from the symbolism itself, but of the ways in which it reveals itself on each new read. The story of Lyra and Will is a beautiful one, one of grief and betrayal, fantasy and adventure, but above all else, it is the story of two people who grow up together, experience life, and fall in love. And in a way, this mirrors the process of reading the story itself, the reader gradually learning more and more about the plot as they themselves evolve. To a child, adolescence is a scary thing, yet Pullman philosophises that it should not be something to be feared, and certainly not something of which to be ashamed. His narrative of free will and humanity in the face of a terrible eternity is simultaneously heart-wrenchingly existential and achingly beautiful, and moves me to this day. This story is arguably a tragedy, but the poetry of the ending turns the inevitable tears into hope, if not for the protagonists, but for the worlds they gave their love to create: their very own ‘republics of heaven’.

The last time I read His Dark Materials, I was seventeen. I know now more than I ever have, and I still have so much more to learn. And I can’t wait to read it again.

2022 JOINT WINNER Filippo Rossi

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

There exists a precious place where the pragmatism of the scientist finds itself in perfect step with the spirit of the poet. It is a rare and magical point where the unexpected may suddenly blossom… and it is from here that Levi’s remarkable collection sings.

First published in 1975 The Periodic Table remains a genre-defining work of subtly complex flavours. To even try to place it in a specific literary realm such as that of the novel, the essay, the memoir would be a step too far. The twenty one brief stories, or “micro-histories” as Levi preferred to call them, move with agile ease between forms and styles. At one time we are faced with the stance of a soaring war narrative that leads us through the “night of Europe” of the 30s, while at another the pages fill with humour and the witty anecdotes of Levi-the-chemist recalling peculiar events in his career. And interspersed in between, emerge shards of the poignant memories of an Auschwitz survivor.

All is held together beautifully by Levi’s delicate eloquence. For even though separate, the tales are exquisitely interwoven. Each one developing in the shadow of a chemical element, the properties and rhythms of which seep into the framework of the narrative, informing the narrator’s voice. For example, in Argon, the noble gas provides the ideal springboard for Levi’s evaluative history of his “inert” and picturesque ancestors, stretching from the the distant centuries up to to the modern day. Quite differently, in Vanadium, the author recalls how in the years following the Second World War, a banal coincidence resulted in a tangled and unsettling epistolary exchange between himself and a former Auschwitz SA. But above all, the true Ariadne’s thread that unites the collection lies not in the memory of the author himself, but in the passionate dialogue between a human being and the elements with which our lives on this planet are inevitably tied: “So it happens” writes the Levi in Carbon “that every element says something to someone.” And this couldn’t be more true. But does this mean that the reader needs to be well versed in chemistry to begin to make sense of this book? Absolutely not!

Although chosen as “the best science book ever” by the Royal Institution of Great Britain, The Periodic Table is not a chemical treatise that may sound distant and surgical. Nor does it bear any resemblance to popular scientific non-fiction the likes of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Instead in Levi’s experimental collection the chemical elements are approached not in a strictly informative way but much more like old friends with whom we share a rich and elaborate past. And it is perhaps this somewhat geological point of view that characterises the work and makes the whole read feel like a refuge from the troubles of our world. It does so not through escapism, but by being a comforting companion, grounded in reality, leading the reader by the hand through moments of profound difficulty and yet managing to condense from them beautiful and delicate crystals. And what more do we need in this challenging times?

2022 20+ WINNER

Blaire Baily
Art & Lies by Jeanette Winterson

Sometimes we need to be saved from ourselves. In her fifth novel, Art & Lies, Jeanette Winterson produces a “seismic shock,” in the hope of prying ossified readers loose from the conventionality that binds them. Winterson goes for broke. She does what Annie Dillard counsels all writers to do: “spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time . . . give it, give it all, give it now.” Winterson goes big because, to her, there is so much at stake. In an era of cynicism, it is courageous to go so far out on a limb out of love for your reader.

The book begins and ends with light: light that emblazons; light that transforms what it touches; light that pierces, violent; unforgiving light; light that triggers a reckoning. The novel is a manifesto, an unapologetic call to arms. It urges the reader to shatter their workaday lives and escape the living death of conformity. The novel’s not so much a subtle cultural critique as an all-out attack on consumerism, cheap sentiment, small-mindedness, and stunted emotion.

Like an opera, the novel speaks through the alternating voices of three reimagined historical figures: Handel, Picasso, and Sappho. The trio are traveling on a high-speed train away from futuristic, dystopian London and toward the sea. The characters are connected in ways they do not immediately understand, including by a book within the book, but they remain ignorant of these connections, and largely alienated from one another, until the novel’s end.

The book’s main preoccupation is the relationship between art and truth (or lies). The epigraph suggests that novels are neither an imitation of the world nor a projection of what it will be; instead, novels offer actual experience—that soup of sensations, emotions, and thoughts, the combination of which does, in rare moments, move us. This is the novel as artifact: a breathing, working invention that operates according to its own internal laws and contains the actual forces that are at work in the everyday world. The novel moves back and forth along a continuum between the discursive, didactic, and logical, represented by Handel on the one hand, and the lyric, associative, and poetic, represented by Sappho on the other.

In attempting to reckon with trauma and come into her own as an artist, a female Picasso character struggles to reconcile memory, identity, art-making, and real life. Picasso’s physical home—with hidden stairs, secret rooms, and unacknowledged places—is a structural manifestation of the revisionist history adopted by her family, which refuses to acknowledge a painful secret. This is one of many examples in which Winterson imagines characters’ internal, psychological landscapes as concrete physical spaces.

Art & Lies is a philosophical novel of ideas, but it is also one of lyrical, imagistic beauty. Using close attention and fresh eyes, Winterson reveals how the familiar natural world is both alien and luminous, both particular and universal. For the characters, speaking is not just a desire; it’s an imperative: “To match the silent eloquence of the created world,” says Sappho, “I have had to learn to speak.”

The style in Sappho’s sections is overtly queer: associative, expressionistic, imagistic, playful, forceful, inventive, breathless, and urgent. Through recursion, a piling on of more and more language, Sappho’s incantatory sections verge on prose poetry. There is precision, but there is also wildness: the images are shifting, layered, and complex. Those who believe in the one-to-one relationship between word and meaning, symbol and sign, will struggle. Readers must push forward, letting the language wash over them and trusting that the experience of reading it—that intensity, free association, and confusion—is itself an act of resistance. Welcome, says the novel, to the revolution.

Art & Lies does indeed deliver the promised “seismic shock.” In describing novelists, Flannery O’Connor said “People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them.” Winterson’s hope and love are obvious: she invested tremendous inventiveness, passion, and energy into a far-reaching, ambitious book. The novel itself is like the light it describes: violent but regenerative, cutting away the inessential, refashioning the old into new life. It is rich, dense territory and it is not for the faint of heart. Critics have described it as “difficult.” And so it is. But, as Winterson wrote, and as I felt after reading Art & Lies, “What challenges me moves me.”

Jacob Hope RUNNER-UP

Rosie – Chicken or Champion?

Books can act as portals, pulling us into different worlds and opening out onto vistas that show different ways of viewing and thinking about the world we inhabit. They provide us with insights in the lives and experiences of others. Seen from the outside, however, books can be walls, barriers that keep the reader in and which block the rest of the world out. Turn a book around, however, and it becomes an open invitation for many to share and to step inside… Picture books are perfect for this, their illustrations offer an immediacy and a common experience that unites people of all ages, abilities and cultures to come together for shared opportunities for storytelling.

Too often, picture books are seen only as stepping stones towards learning how to read. They are, however, an exciting hybrid form in their own right, part visual, part verbal. Some of the earliest and most enduring recordings of human experience were made through art – cave paintings depicting hunts, or handprints using natural dyes and pigments. When we read pictures we connect with a form that our ancestors used for century after century.

Picture books bring words and images together in dynamic interplay. Sometimes they complement one another serving to tell the same story. At other times they contrast or conflict with one another, showing different perspectives and providing alternative ways of seeing or thinking. This is very true of Pat Hutchins’s book, Rosie’s Walk, a story told in economic prose with a scant thirty-two words occurring throughout the books and telling the story of a presumably ordinary, everyday walk around the familiar farmyard for a hen.

The pictures, however, tell another story and introduce both conflict and suspect to the tale. From the outset the reader sees the fox who always remains elusively out of view of Rosie, the hen and yet who is never referred to within the text. As Rosie sets out from the henhouse, readers catch their first glimpse of the fox with the red tongue peeping out showing a hungry intent. The words in the story tell us about the journey Rosie takes and the animals and object she encounters in the farmyard. The pictures meanwhile follow a clever structure where visual clues are set up as to the dangers that await fox across one spread and where page turns build a delicious sense of anticipation and suspense before the inevitable fate befalls the fox!

There’s a wonderful question around whether Rosie is truly as oblivious as she appears, or if she is in fact filled with a cunning and guile that far outstrips that of the wily fox, leading the four-legged fiend a merry dance? There’s an early introduction here to character motivation. We have the mouth-watering anticipation of fresh chicken that tempts the fox and the uncertainty surrounding Rosie’s purpose for walking around the farmyard and the possible reversal of tropes and types as Rosie rather than the fox plots and plans!

The journey itself sees Rosie leave the safety of the henhouse and explore the farmyard, a metaphor analogous for growing up and pushing beyond the confines and comforts of home and finding our own way in the world despite the dangers this might entail. The illustrations in the story use a muted yet highly distinctive palette of reds, oranges and greens perhaps drawing upon traffic-light cultural associations of danger, ambivalence or alertness and of danger. Folk art style influences run through the illustrations conjuring a pastoral idyll of a homely farmstead which contrast with some of the possible perils that face Rosie.

An alchemy between words and pictures creates a fully immersive story which has enchanted and empowered readers for over fifty years, placing them one step ahead of the written narrative just as Rosie herself remains a step ahead of the fox. Picture books are far more than just stepping stones towards learning to read, they are part personal response, part performance and offer a wholly satisfying and enlivening reading experience that all can engage in!

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2021 WINNERS & RUNNERS-UP

2021 WINNER 13-16 AGE GROUP: GRACE CLIFT

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

With themes of adolescence, psychiatry, womanhood and the painstakingly relatable experience of lacking direction, Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ is unforgettable. “The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.” Esther Greenwood is a bright college student, working on a magazine in New York with eleven other college girls. The food is expensive but paid for, the parties are loud and all night, the selection of boys is plentiful; life should be everything she’d dreamed of. But she feels utterly broken. As she attempts to conform to what she thinks young adult life of a pretty girl should be, the book follows Esther’s descent into what she calls “the bell jar”; her mental breakdown. One of the themes that make ‘The Bell Jar’ a book I just couldn’t put down is the emptiness of convention. Esther obsesses over her future, and how she can fit into the perfect life she believes she must attain. Her trip to New York was expected to be glamorous and perfect, but she finds herself feeling unable to escape an unsettling feeling of numbness, occasionally broken through with danger and fear. Men were supposed to be honest and kind, but she’s consistently mistreated, and even when she isn’t, it’s never the perfect romance that she envisioned. Her future was a green fig tree of experience and excitement, but Esther watches in desperation as “the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” To put it in her words, “I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”

Reading this book in an age where conventionality is growing its presence in media; in college requirements; in social standards; I kept having to pause and reflect on how utterly relatable Esther’s thought patterns were at the beginning of the story. She believes she’s the only person who thinks the way she does; who has little direction; who feels lost; who hasn’t fallen in love; who’s terrified of losing herself in growing up. From the perspective of a teenage girl, this story struck me with its painful honesty on how being a girl can be completely frightening. However, I think that everyone who has stepped foot on the Earth can understand the disorientation that being alive brings.

Later in the book, Esther begins to whirlwind into something I cannot relate to personally, but the articulation of her thoughts and what she viewed as rational was truly heartbreaking. At multiple times, I just wanted to reach through the pages and hold onto her. If you do decide to read ‘The Bell Jar’, which I avidly encourage you to do, I recommend researching for trigger warnings before you begin, as there’s some incredibly heavy topics and descriptions included. But the beauty in which Sylvia Plath vocalizes these experiences is truly astounding. Whether you live in luxury and happiness consistently, or are in the darkest place you’ve ever been, it’s difficult to not empathize with Esther; and it’s mainly down to Plath’s meticulous characterisation that’s ever specific to human nature. With a mixture of relatability, agonizing storytelling, and a sense of adolescent honesty, ‘The Bell Jar’ is one of those books that is difficult not to love. While most good books pull you into a story, ‘The Bell Jar’ goes one step further and lets you pull yourself out of it. After you’ve done the dishes, after you’ve gone to bed, you’ll still be reflecting on that one quote that hits you hard. It’s a book that makes you look up and think about the world; a book that makes you angry, and sad, and truly hopeful. I will leave you with my favourite quote from the book, that I think encapsulates what it’s like to feel connected with being alive. “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”

2021 WINNER 17-19 AGE GROUP: MAY LIU CANNON

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

When you first learn to talk, the language you learn is all you know. As you grow older, language becomes your medium to navigate the world – you argue with your parents, you confide in your friend, you write essays for school. When a pandemic hits and you can no longer hug your grandma to tell her you care or cry on a friends’ shoulder, the language you acquired at birth quickly becomes your map, your way of sustaining all you have lost.

And then, when the only way you can talk with your grandad in China is over a disconnecting Facetime, and your only form of communication your own broken Chinese, you begin to wonder at the importance of language itself. Never before had you tried to consider the beauty of your own language or the wonder in others. When I picked up Orlando, a short, formless novella, I suddenly understood the abilities, meanings, and images of my mother tongue. “The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went”: this is one of my favourite quotes, in which we can see Woolf’s complex understanding of the English language, the way in which it can be structured to convey the most wonderful sentiments, such as the fleeting nature of beauty and love. Feeling inadequate in Chinese and strangled in a lockdown world where texting and emails were your only form of connection, the language of Orlando reminded me that linguistics do not exist only for communication, but to accomplish something more abstract and beautiful.

Woolf’s wondrous words aside, her examination of gender is itself remarkable; indeed, they are challenging even in the complex world of modern gender politics. As Orlando moves from being a male Elizabethan aristocrat, to a non-binary tribal foreigner, to a female high society Victorian, questions arise in the reader that we might never have thought of before. What is gender? Woolf critiques, prods at and tackles the concept itself. She demonstrates, brilliantly, the clear constraints of the women and the more hidden, tragic constraints of the man. Orlando, after becoming a woman, realises “women are not obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces…by the most tedious discipline”- when I read these lines, I actually gasped. I felt understood and validated in these sentences and the many other comments Virginia makes on the tedious aspects of female existence – without a doubt, although written in the 1920s, the book is more than relevant to modern concerns about gender. Then, I felt a sense of equal validation in Woolf’s love of being a woman; asking “Which is the greater ecstasy? The man’s or the woman’s?… this is the most delicious” (here, Orlando is exploring the world as a woman for the first time). Woolf goes further than any other author I have read in resisting the easy ways out of the themes she is grabbling with. I think that it could be very easy to discuss gender in an almost clichéd manner, but nowhere in Orlando did I feel I was reading anything other than Virginia’s own complex and nuanced thoughts. She forces the reader to think, and rethink, and finally to accept that, like literature and like life, there is no clear answer, just more questions.

Pretention in literature can often leave a sour taste: Personally, I found other Modernist writers such as Fitzgerald, with their slightly trying too hard attitude, irritating. Woolf, however, in the complete absurdity of Orlando’s life, opens the door for us to laugh at and with her, to forget and let go our preconceived notions of the ‘sentence’, and indeed of the form of the novel as a whole. Whilst in her other writing, Woolf might be accused of being too philosophical, too wordy, in Orlando she has fashioned a creation too bizarre to be a biography, and too anachronistic to be a regular novel. Her nudge-nudge-wink-wink manner of writing flourishes when she allows herself little to no constraints – whether those constraints be on form, language, or humanity itself.

Orlando has stayed with me since I finished the book. It reminds me, when I feel inadequate, that the world is ridiculous. After you have read and enjoyed a novel about a hermaphrodite time traveller who writes poetry, which is actually about a real aristocratic garden designer (Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville West), the mundanity of your own life might actually become a bizarre form of comfort.

2021 WINNER 20+ AGE GROUP: EMILY FOSTER

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

If you ask my parents, they’ll tell you that as a kid I had no interest in reading at all. While my older sister was blasting her way through books, reading way above her age range, I was happy playing outside getting grass stains and falling off the swing.

On long car journeys we would usually listen to audiobooks. Again, I usually paid little attention to these, they were to entertain my dad more than anyone, to give him something to listen to while he was driving. I slept through countless audio versions of Inspector Morse and Brideshead Revisited, not understanding any of it. Then, one day, my dad came back from paying for petrol with a brand-new tape clutched in his hand. I didn’t know it then, but this spur of the moment purchase was going to change my life forever. Putting the tape in the player it spoke those immortal words, ‘Treasure Island by Robert Lewis-Stevenson’.

From the start I was hooked. This wasn’t some kids picture book, this was a story. It had adventure, characters, and an atmosphere so rich I could see the ocean, smell the salt, feel the sand between my toes. I couldn’t believe it when my dad said it was available as a book. That couldn’t be possible, books weren’t like this, books were boring and involved a lot sitting still and staring at black on white.

I’m not going to say the first book I ever read was Treasure Island, I certainly wasn’t that precocious, but it was the story which made me realize books were something exciting.

Flash forward to present day and I have three copies of Treasure Island on my bookcase. My original copy, worn and battered from the amount of times I’ve read it cover to cover (and dropping it in the bath definitely didn’t help!), a copy I bought at university because I just had to read it again but hadn’t had the space to bring any books to my accommodation, and a fancy, hardback copy I treated myself to just because it was beautiful.

As a kid I loved it because it was a thrilling adventure the likes of which I had never seen before, but as I got older I’ve realized there’s so much more to it than that. It’s a coming of age book about a timid, thirteen-year-old boy finding his courage and overcoming adversity, but it’s also a deep look into desire and greed and how the promise of wealth can change a person. In the end the fabled treasure map doesn’t lead the pirates to the piles of gold and doubloons they had been dreaming about, it leads them to an empty hole in the ground. They throw themselves into it like they’re throwing themselves into their own grave, scratching around in the dust with their fingernails, almost driven mad by their greed.

Indeed, Ben Gunn, the poor pirate who had been marooned on the island, had spent much of his time searching for the treasure before digging it up and dragging it back to his cave. But it’s done nothing for him being trapped on the island all alone with nothing but his money. He’s half insane and more than anything wants human company. The treasure means nothing without people.

Even at the end of the story, when the good guys have won and the bad guys have lost, they’ve loaded the gold on the ship and set sail for home, the triumph is not that they are all rich, but that they are alive. Jim makes no mention of how much he receives or what he does with it because it’s unimportant. He outright says that no force on Earth would get him to return to the island for the caches of silver still left buried there. He has no desire for more money. In fact, the story ends on a sombre note which shows the reader that, despite being the object all the characters were dreaming about, the gold bought Jim nothing but nightmares.

To this day, Treasure Island is still my favourite book of all time, though I can slightly blame it for the fact I no longer have space on my bookshelf and bookshops get more of my money than I care to admit. But it started a life-long love affair with stories and books that has shaped who I am as a person, and that’s the real treasure here.

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2020 WINNERS & RUNNERS-UP

 2020 WINNER 13-16 AGE GROUP: SOPHIA PAULS

The Storied Life of A.J Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin 

“We are not quite novels.

We are not quite short stories.

In the end, we are collected works.”

I came across this novel by sinfully judging it by its cover, or rather by being overcome by a wave of familiarity and nostalgic sentimentality when seeing the red dusty door of A.J Fikry’s bookshop. I felt transported back to the creaking sound of the splintered wooden door followed by a cool wave of the prickling scent of musty, vanillin yellow pages whilst I warmly smiled at the lovable old curmudgeon book seller of my favourite bookshop in Munich that resembled A.J Fikry to an almost absurd level.  A place in their bookstores is not reserved for just any old book- where “No Man Is an Island; Every Book Is a World.”  Fikry’s ridiculously specific taste only satisfied by very specific works made me chuckle immediately and never entirely disappeared throughout the warm atmosphere I enjoyed the rest of the book in.  

A.J Fikry’s life seems to be filled with a series of unfortunate events in the opening of the novel; he has recently lost his wife and sales in his bookshops drift towards bankruptcy, resulting in Fikry’s descent into a state of lonely bitterness that I personally found created tender Ed Fredericksen tones throughout. I was thus even more touched when his most prized possession, a first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tamerlane”, is stolen whilst he is passed out after drinking too much. He slowly disintegrates and recoils away from society- until someone unexpectedly shows up in the bare children’s section, changing his life forever. 

 It really is a talisman of hope, that highlights the emotional value of books in an admirably excellent way. Whilst I generally shy away from books that drip in romantic aphorisms and what I find to be trivial philosophies of love (sorry Jane Austen, but I dragged my way through Pride and Prejudice), Zevin has created a new dimension of the romantic for me that uses a rare poignant playfulness, sarcasm and a healthy “rain on your wedding day” kind of sarcastic wit that I have truly never seen so beautifully and skillfully executed in any book before. It is a homage to bookish people like me, who still believe in the old-fashioned beauty of holding paper instead of e-books, enter old bookshops with grumpy owners instead of surfing on e-libraries and put way too much sentimental value into their first copy of their most beloved childhood book ( “der kleine Prinz” still sits in the same corner of my wooden bookshelf it was first placed in 15 years ago) . Fikry mirrors the way book lovers think and act, hilariously stating that if Nic, the police officer committed to finding his stolen book was a novel he would “stop reading right now.” In fact, he’d “throw it across the room.” The impatience I have with unstimulating books transfers itself onto people sometimes, and it is I am sure a feeling book-lovers know all too well – Zevin picks up these minute patterns cleverly and creates an incredibly alluring read throughout every moment of the book.

Embedded in short summaries of some of my most cherished works of all time by authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, or triggering Year 7 childhood memories of ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ by Roald Dahl, the novel retains its charming, vibrant and vigorous poetic excellency at the start of every chapter, signifying Fikry’s but also the reader’s personal journey through life through the medium of books- Zevin makes the profoundly touching and unifying point of all readers’ lives being “storied” in some way. 

I genuinely think this book has positively changed my life. Behind every person, quite literally, there is a story as deep and bold as an ocean. “The Storied Life of A.J Fikry” teaches compassion, the importance of love and the beauty of humour in morbid, ironically unfitting misfortunes of life. It is first and foremost a superbly written love letter celebrating the love for reading, providing a hopeful and positive view on the future of bookshops and the world of reading and leaving me gleefully smiling with a large lump in my throat, which I could never have imagined when first opening that creaking red dusty door.

The winner in the 17–19 age group category was Isabel Lee, whose entry was Holes by Louis Sachar. The judges noted that this was a: “A creative and well-sustained piece, successfully assuming another voice, and demonstrating the reader’s engagement in the work.” The runner-up was Dylan Bailey with Depression and Other Magic Tricks by Sabrina Benaim.

2020 WINNER 17-19 AGE GROUP: ISABEL LEE

Holes by Louis Sachar

Well, hello there. Fancy you chancing upon this.

I’m Stanley Yelnats. Strange name, I know. It’s made me the target of bullying for years. I can’t help it – it’s not my fault that generations of women in my family like how ‘Stanley’ is ‘Yelnats’ spelled backwards. I guess that’s the one remotely interesting characteristic I possess – that one titbit of knowledge I’d offer up at a meet-and-greet session and then withdraw from conversation, because I really don’t have anything else to say.

I’m not sure why you’d be interested to read my story, honestly. There’s nothing flashy or thrilling about it. For starters, I’m not a very impressive protagonist. Yes, I lost a lot of weight and became a bit fitter – that’s what happens when you’re confined in a prison barely disguised as a camp, and all you’re allowed to do is dig holes. But my story isn’t a dieting manual. It’s about adventure, mystery, and friendship! Well, it’s supposed to be. But you can’t really spin a very impressive plotline when your story is set in acres and acres of dry, yellow desert sand, and most of the hero’s daily routine involves digging holes that are five feet wide, five feet deep. 

Perhaps, you think, you’ll be drawn in by my compelling actions throughout the novel. What compelling actions? My most common action throughout the narrative was raising my shoulder up… and down. When I finally took a stand for myself and tried to stage a grand escape by truck, I drove it straight… into a hole. The only part I could call a climax in my tale was when I stood in a hole overnight, in mortal peril for my life, as deadly lizards crawled all over me. Rather than saving anyone, I was certainly the one needing to be saved. 

Maybe, you wonder, (are you losing faith in me yet?) I say inspiring things, quotes that can be set in stone and appear in Goodreads or your literature essay. Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t talk much. Perhaps that’s what Zero and I have in common. Zero’s my friend – the friend I found when I was wrongfully convicted, and the one who survived the hell of those few months with me. Zero’s the one with a thrilling backstory; homelessness and abandonment, toughing it out on the streets, surviving a near death ordeal in the sunbaked heat of a mysterious mountain shaped like a thumb. Good luck getting him to repeat the past though. He’s had enough of that.

Now, you ask if there’s a moral in my narrative. I hate to disappoint you, but I doubt you would. Perhaps the narrator has slipped in a sly commentary about our world, that our lifestyles are nothing more than pointless routines and boring habits – burrowing through life’s futile assignments day in day out. But that’s subtlety I’m not able to catch. 

I guess you’ll also enjoy the legends surrounding my story. Don’t get me wrong – these aren’t those fairytales with princes and princesses and happily-ever-afters. Legends get twisted, some turn out all right, most don’t. The happy endings get rude revelations. Smelly feet stay smelly feet, no matter how attractive you are. There’s justice, but justice hidden under so many layers of dirt and heartbreak that it’s nearly impossible to sift through. You feel it under your feet, but you can’t dig it up – maybe you’re too afraid to.

This isn’t about the story – it’s about storytelling. It’s about how children bear the sins of the father. It’s the long, arduous detours we take to make sure unfulfilled promises get fulfilled. It’s about why our names are important, even a name like Stanley Yelnats. 

But surely you aren’t looking for storytelling. Few people care to look for the genesis, the story behind the story. Most people just take the story itself, like how they take the first box of artificial- sugar cereal without noticing the good stuff behind, tucked just out of reach. Not many people know how to search for the storytelling, let alone dig for it. 

Still, since you’ve obliged yourself to read this far, perhaps you should take a look. Grab a tall glass of water to quench your thirst as you read, try a few raw onions too – they aren’t too bad once you get used to them.  

I hope you’ll find what you’re looking for – what I last expected to find in a 5 feet wide, 5 feet deep hole.

2020 WINNER 20+ AGE GROUP: OLIVIA BIGNOLD-JORDAN

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am ashamed. Ashamed and embarrassed, that at fifteen years old, my reaction to learning I would be studying a Nigerian novel by an author whose name I could not pronounce was one of exasperation. I envied friends reading Lord of the Flies; its gory survival of the fittest narrative chimed with YA literature of the time. I’d just devoured The Hunger Games, and as far as I was concerned, any novel that didn’t feature the sensationalised butchery of children was failing to acknowledge a fundamental truth of human existence.

In comparison, the story of a Nigerian schoolgirl’s coming-of-age in a devoutly religious society sounded all too tame. But I was more than just unenthused. I was hostile. I didn’t like the way my eyes tripped over the wealth of foreign words before me. I felt handicapped by unfamiliarity. Igbo, harmattan, coups, mmuo, Chukwu – they all washed over me in a disorientating wave of exoticism. And yet I’d readily familiarised myself with the Capitol, reapings, and hunger games, through the prism of a white girl like myself.  

That’s racism. 

Academic insecurity revealed my prejudice, but Purple Hibiscus humbled me. I took responsibility for my own biases. The capacity of a good story to sugar the pill of culpability makes literature an invaluable weapon against racism.

Reading Purple Hibiscus was all-consuming. I lived a double life: one in musty old England, and another in febrile Nigeria, walking in Kambili’s footsteps, feeling the dry harmattan soil under my toes and chasing Aunty Ifeoma’s throaty laughter. Adichie had me gripped from the prologue’s title – ‘Breaking Gods’. Such a taut phrase, laden with biblical power. Immediately, I was hers. And it didn’t stop there: sensual descriptions are complemented by pithy adages and gnomic prophecies throughout. Nigeria’s political turmoil, all summarised in four neat syllables, the French-Latin hybrid of ‘Coups begat coups’. I was intoxicated by her wisdom, easily on par with that of the Shakespeare I was concurrently studying. 

For all its grandiosity, Purple Hibiscus is grounded by the worldview of a girl whose age matched my own at time of reading. But whilst my childhood was couched in privilege, Kambili’s oppressive homelife functions as a microcosm of a wider crisis. Papa’s barbaric punishments are far from extraordinary; UNICEF estimates that 60% of Nigerian children have been subjected to violence. Yet in Purple Hibiscus, as in reality, there is no such thing as undiluted villainy. Papa’s tears disclose the victim at the tyrant’s core, who weeps at the burden of inherited patriarchal violence. 

Whilst Purple Hibiscus subjects religion to firm scrutiny, it’s not an atheistic polemic. Like her foremother of feminist literature, Alice Walker, Adichie plants freedom in faith. Whereas Papa uses church doctrine as a stick with which to beat his family, Father Amadi’s liberal worship is the carrot that coaxes Kambili out of her cloistered upbringing. 

Of course, Kambili’s admiration is not purely pious; she is besotted with Father Amadi. Her infatuation is conveyed through the universal, bodily language of a girl for whom teen romance is entirely alien. She knows only that she wishes to be the water he drinks, ‘going into him, to be with him, one with him’. This eroticism, interwoven with spirituality, felt simultaneously taboo and sacrosanct. How better to depict the magnitude of desire than through the lexis of faith? I learnt that love is multifaceted, knotty and nuanced, and that sometimes the power lies in the fantasy, not the fulfillment.  

Purple Hibiscus is a fleshy novel, infused with humanity. Images remain imprinted in my mind with striking lucidity: the flash of Aunty Ifeoma’s scarlet lipstick, an emblem of hope that dwarfs Gatsby’s green light in my memory; Papa’s ‘missal’, heavy with the weight of doctrinal dread; and the titular amethyst flower, ‘rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom.’ Liberty incarnate. And all the food! Yam porridge and fried azu and jollof rice and mouth-watering ankara and the ubiquitous fufu. How I longed to taste these dishes, to step into this world myself.

When Beyonce sampled Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists TEDtalk, I felt vindicated. Suddenly, she was cool, and so too were her politics. I’m biased, but I believe her spoken word interlude marked a broader cultural embrace of feminism. 

As great as Beyonce is, I’m a bookworm at heart. It is Adichie’s fiction that led me to read, study and adore a cornucopia of Black feminist literature. And it is stories that will sow the seeds for a fairer future.

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