Teen Prize Longlist!

So here it is, the 2009 Booktrust Teenage Prize longlist! Released yesterday over on the Booktrust site.

• The Ant Colony by Jenny Valentine (HarperCollins)
• The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness (Walker)
• Ausländer by Paul Dowswell (Bloomsbury)
• Bloodchild by Tim Bowler (Oxford University Press)
• Exposure by Mal Peet (Walker)
• Furnace: Lockdown by Alexander Gordon Smith (Faber)
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (Bloomsbury)
• Numbers by Rachel Ward (Chicken House)
• Ostrich Boys by Keith Gray (Definitions)
• Solitaire by Bernard Ashley (Usborne)
• Tales of Terror from the Black Ship by Chris Priestley (Bloomsbury)
• Three Ways to Snog an Alien by Graham Joyce (Faber)
• The Vanishing of Katharina Linden by Helen Grant (Puffin)

A very interesting list, if you ask me, with a huge range of strong books of all kinds. Funny books and serious books, little domestic books and big sweeping adventure books, lovely warm books and scarily chilling books… A really good ‘something for everyone’ sort of selection. And some absolutely superb writing. (Tho’ looking at it again now, it seems like quite a boy-ish list – I wonder what you think of that… Hmm…)

Anyway, thirteen titles in all, with the shortlist of six to be announced on September 21st.

Now that this is public, just wanted to mention a few books I loved during the reading process that sadly didn’t make it onto the longlist but I think deserve an extra plug:

• Nation by Terry Pratchett
• Rowan the Strange by Julie Hearn
• Stolen by Lucy Christopher
• The Traitor Game by B.R. Collins

All four are really terrific, and highly recommended. (Stolen and Nation will be among our soon-forthcoming Books of the Week, so you’ll be able to read more about them both on here shortly.)

And while I’m reminiscing, I also enjoyed… David Almond’s Jackdaw Summer; Adèle Geras’s Dido; Sally Gardner’s The Silver Blade; Linda Newbery’s Sandfather; Sarah Singleton’s Poison Garden; Damian Kelleher’s Life, Interrupted; Philip Reeve’s Fever Crumb and Gillian Philip’s Crossing the Line. Oh, and others, too...

Oh dear, so many books…