We were absolutely thrilled to win three of the major five prizes on offer at the TSBA (Six Book Challenge) hosted by Caterham School last Friday.

We took 16 keen pupils from Years 6-8 who had the opportunity to hear and meet four of the authors who were shortlisted. Paul Dowswell (Auslander), Frances Hardinge (The Lie Tree), Nicholas Bowling (Witchborn) and Mohammad Khan (I Am Thunder). It was an engaging and thoughtful presentation and we also had the opportunity to look at work submitted by other schools afterwards.

20 schools were involved this year, and so we were bowled away by winning three of the five prizes. Sadly we were only able to enter two Emanuel ‘selections’ from each of the two categories (Reviews and Creative Response) as the standard of our work was so high we could have entered many other superb pieces.

Our winners were:

First prize in the review section: Jonathan (7SFP)

Second prize in the review section: Tom (8HEB)

Second prize in the creative response section: Atitiya (8HEB)

Ice with her creative response to 'The Lie Tree' and author Frances Hardinge

We had already contacted the authors personally and sent them photos of our pupil’s work and they were incredibly complimentary. Mo Khan (I Am Thunder) in particular adored Ice’s (8CY) musical composition and Paul Dowswell (Auslander) was freaked out by Meg’s (8HEB) amazing board game inspired by Nazi purity testing. Many of the pupil’s received personal feedback from the authors which was a very nice touch.

The TSBA Challenge will return in June when the next selection of books is released.

Ice's response to her creative piece from 'I Am Thunder' author Mohammad Khan