Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Witchstruck wins YA category at the RoNAs 2013!


This is just to let you know that my novel Witchstruck won the Young Adult Romantic Novel of the Year Award tonight in London's Piccadilly.

Judy Finnigan and Richard Madeley (pictured here) handed out the awards.

If I stuttered and blubbed a bit at the podium, I should probably be forgiven. I hadn't expected to win and couldn't quite believe it. It was a truly overwhelming moment.

Here's the winning book: Witchstruck.

Read more about Witchstruck on Amazon.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

New Poems at Epicentre Magazine

Random poetic image: Aldeburgh
For those of you who are interested in poetry and the like, there are three new poetry entries at Epicentre Magazine this week.

I have two poems in the online magazine myself this time, though they cannot technically be termed 'new'. They are part of a tentative poem sequence I wrote in about 1999, set on the Isle of Man during the last throes of the English Civil War. The poems are written in the narrative voice of Illiam Dhone, who is believed to have surrendered the Island to Cromwell's forces - most probably to avoid major bloodshed among his native Manxmen.

Old they may be - and indeed they were 'lost' for many years, and only regained when Neil Astley at Bloodaxe very kindly emailed them back to me after a decade in a filing cabinet (the poems were in a filing cabinet, not Neil Astley) - but they are still - as far as I know - unpublished. I suppose it's possible one or two of them were published in one of the UK's poetry magazines twelve years ago. But if so, I have no memory of it. And I'm pretty certain no one else will have, either.

Anyway, a few things for those interested in poetry. A moment snatched in the middle of prose to look back at the lyric impulse.

Here's the page at Epicentre.