The judging panel for this year's tenth East Anglian Book Awards has now been announced. Trevor Heaton reports.
ne of Britain's most talked-about new novelists is to judge the Fiction category of this year's East Anglian Book Awards, it has been revealed.
Norwich writer Sarah Perry's second novel, The Essex Serpent, has been a number one bestseller in both hardback and paperback and picked up Waterstones Book of the Year 2016 and both Fiction book of the Year and Overall Book of the Year 2017 at the British Book Awards. It was then nominated for a further eight literary prizes.
Sara – who won the EABA Book of the Year title for her first novel, After Me Comes the Flood - will be part of a six-strong panel drawn from the worlds of writing, academia, the book trade and journalism.
Biography & Memoir judge D J Taylor is a writer and critic. His novels include Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both long-listed for the Booker Prize. His Orwell: The Life won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Prize, and his most recent books are The Prose Factory and The New Book of Snobs (both 2016). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore, and their three children.
Jarrold book buyer Chris Rushby will be judging the History and Tradition category. He has worked in the industry for more than 30 years, including senior management roles at Waterstones, Blackwells and WH Smith. He recently completed a BA Arts & Literature degree from the Open University 34 years after beginning it. Chris is also the author of biographies of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
Rebecca Stott, the judge of the General Non-Fiction category, is an author and academic. She teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at UEA and writes fiction and non-fiction. Her novels include Ghostwalk and The Coral Thief. She lives in Norfolk.
Poetry judge Jeremy Noel-Tod grew up in Norfolk and teaches in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at UEA. He has written about contemporary poetry for many national publications and is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry (2013) and the Complete Poems of R F Langley (2015). His critical book, The Whitsun Wedding Video: A Journey into British Poetry (Rack Press), was published in 2015.
Feature writer Rowan Mantell is judging the Mal Peet Children's Award. Her work has frequently been shortlisted for national journalism awards and her interview with Sarah Perry was this year published as part of the paperback edition of The Essex Serpent. Rowan studied English Literature at UEA, where she also edited the student newspaper. She also looks after the Friday Family section of this newspaper.
The tenth EDP-Jarrold East Anglian Book Awards are run in association with Writers' Centre Norwich and UEA. Entries for this year's awards close at noon on Friday July 21. Further details on https://tinyurl.com/y82gbreh
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