After a two year hiatus the New Angle Prize returns in 2023. Inaugurated in 2009, the Prize is a biennial award for a recently published book of literary merit, associated with or influenced by East Anglia. It aims to celebrate and encourage excellence in the regional literature of East Anglia. The Prize is open to recently published work, in print, which may be fiction, non-fiction or poetry. Entry to the competition opens in September 2022, entries for the 2023 award will have been published between 1st January 2021 and 31st December 2022. The award is a partnership between the Ipswich Institute, Suffolk Book League and the University of Suffolk, who hold their own annual prize, the Student New Angle Prize (SNAP), a short story award which any student attending the university can enter.
We are proud to present our three judges for the 2023 prize:
Sophie Green is the author of the Potkin and Stubbs spooky detective series. Sophie has also written comedy, a blog and short stories, sometimes using other writing names. Her first novel, The Last Giant, was shortlisted for The Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction competition and Potkin and Stubbs, the first of the three-book series, was shortlisted for the Bath Children’s Novel Award. Sophie has a degree in zoology and an interest in folklore and urban legend. She was born and still lives in East Anglia and also works as a children’s book buyer and librarian for Suffolk Libraries.
Keith Jones is chair of the Suffolk Book League, his home has always overflowed with books. Keith says ‘Reading books has always been for me not only a pleasure but a most important humanising activity. I've spent my life very much among people of all kinds as a priest in the Church of England, and my last jobs were as dean of Exeter Cathedral and then York Minster, both of which are buzzing places with great libraries. They are also glorious places of deep emotion and memory. But now I live in one of my favourite towns, Ipswich, where I was a vicar for some years, and love the Suffolk land, water and sky and the human habitations which have been here so long. As chair of the Suffolk Book League I love the way writers and artists have so long responded to this region and I want others to enjoy what they do for us’.
Liz Trenow is the NY Times and USA Today top twenty author of nine best-selling historical novels and has been published all over the world, translated into many languages. She was born and brought up in Sudbury, Suffolk, to a family who have been silk weavers for nearly three hundred years and are still weaving today. Many of her novels are inspired by her Suffolk silk heritage and other aspects of local history including Under a Wartime Sky (2020) which featured the secret development of radar at Bawdsey Manor and The Secrets of the Lake (2021), a coming-of-age story linked to the myth of a dragon that resides in the Stour Valley. Her most recent, a World War Two novel Searching for Rosa (May 2022) is also partly set in the county. Liz worked for many years as a journalist for national and regional newspapers, including the East Anglian Daily Times, and on BBC radio and television news before turning her hand to writing fiction.
Jo Rooks
General Manager of the Ipswich Institute