Writing Award 2022

A new mother with a tumultuous past thinks she has found security and community, but war, espionage, and forces from her former life will test both who she believes herself to be and what she is prepared do to protect her newfound happiness, her child, and the two extraordinary men she loves.

A young woman is taken on a journey of self-discovery by an innocent looking Advent calendar.

A distrustful exile, a powerful loose cannon, and a planet about to be devoured by a mad god.

In the turmoil of the Norman victory at Hastings a young English girl must help King Harold's widow escape captivity to enable her sons to launch the resistance, while their captor, a Norman knight, begins to question his allegiance to Duke William in this dual narrative of the Norman Conquest.

When the captain throws out her fishing line, what will a Big Blue Boat see? A story within a story, rhythm, rhyme, and repetition introduces life forms found in the Indian Ocean, while the imaging hints at the cycle of life.

When the captain throws out her fishing line, what will a Big Blue Boat see? A story within a story, rhythm, rhyme, and repetition introduces life forms found in the Indian Ocean, while the imaging hints at the cycle of life.

A Big Blue Boat and her young female Captain are confronted with every sailor’s nightmare. Will they find a way to survive?

An underestimated housemaid and a hungry young reporter team up to search first for a missing man, then to root out a vicious serial killer, in Victorian era Chicago.

In a world where a secretive group, whose aim is to help not conquer, has guided the actions of many, changing history as we know it. We are introduced to a dedicated team led by Richard Braydon (who receives a strange invitation) and their early adventures fighting both the supernatural and crime.

The wife of a small-town police chief obsesses over a former NYPD detective to the extent she will do anything to have him, or kill him.

A covert investigator refuses to accept the cause of his fiancée’s death until he discovers evidence too close to home to deny.

A teenage anti-terrorist organisation, linked to the Tanzanian police, has to prevent uranium ore being smuggled out of Tanzania to rogue states for development of nuclear weapons.

Based on the untold true story of an East African serviceman who joined Allied Forces in WWII only to become a prisoner of war to the Japanese. He was miraculously repatriated before the Americans bombed Tokyo and returned to the woman in Tanganyika who had never given up hope.

A bright Tanganyikan girl called Redemption finds unexpected humour working as a cook on the tropical island of Zanzibar in the heady days leading up to Christmas 1963 but the plot twists as the threat of conjugal slavery and revolution separate her from the man she grows to love.

It’s hard to become a doctor; infinitely more so if you’re an orphan from a Nairobi slum.

Sam's mum was dead. All he had to remember her by was an old tape recorder. 'Talk to it' she'd said - it would be like talking to her - But it wasn't. Now he was living with Aunt Lucy, the aunt from Hell. His only help in surviving were: the tape recorder, some Plasticine and a box of drawing pins.

THE TRUTH (SORT OF) ABOUT THE ICEBERG is an alternative history/fantasy where two orphans—one an accidental stowaway, the other a puppet in his uncle's con game—must save the Titanic from yeti-like icebergs. (Spoiler alert: one of them is a mermaid.)

Horatius Scapula, Roman procurator, steps from his portrait in Rodechester Museum. He commands Edward Keaton, the curator's son, to be his guide around town. Trying to cope with twenty-first century finally gets him arrested - but he does save the museum from the unscrupulous Councillor Collins.