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It’s that time of year again, where Book Club attended the YTF Book Awards at RAF Cosford. During this year’s ceremony, schools all across Staffordshire came together to celebrate their love of reading with: a quiz to challenge teams from schools who had read all six shortlisted titles; talks from published authors and voting for the title that would become this year’s Young Teen Fiction novel.

At CCSC, we created quiz questions based on our chosen novel from this year’s shortlist, Mary Hoffman’s ‘The Ravenmaster’s Boy’. This novel follows the protagonist, Kit Wagstaffe, and his troop of magical ravens on their quest to prevent the execution of Anne Boleyn. Our questions were prepared in advance, ready to be presented to the five schools competing to win the trophy at the Award’s Mastermind competition.

As well as this, we heard talks from the two guest authors. Up first was Phillip Caveney of the ‘Sebastian Darke’ series (he also wrote ‘Scarecrow’ under the pseudonym ‘Danny Weston’.) The second speaker was Ben Davis of ‘The Private Blog of Joe Cowley’ series. Both authors were extremely amusing but also gave pupils an insight to the processes used by writers to create a successful series.

Finally, after much anticipation, the results were: 

1. The Nearest Faraway Place – Hayley Long
2. Scarecrow – Danny Weston
3. The Ones That Disappeared – Zana Fraillon
4. The Liar’s Handbook – Keren David
5. The Ravenmaster’s Boy – Mary Hoffman
6. But Then I Came Back – Estelle Laure

Finally, the day was drawn to a close by Staffordshire’s Young Poet Laureate, Rebecca Lockwood, reading a poem she had written to commemorate the event.

It was an exciting day for all pupils involved and we are eager to start reading potential titles for next year’s coveted prize!

Mrs K Durrant and Mrs D Thompson

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