Leapfrog Press, Can of Worms Press, Anthony McGowan and all the readers who have given of their time in judging the 2021 Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize are delighted to announce the winner/s of the inaugural YA | MG Category prize:
Two works share the YA prize for 2021. Both entries were by the same author, Faith Shearin. She wins the prize with her entries, Lost River, 1918 and Horse Latitudes. Lost River will be published first in August 2022 with Horse Latitudes to follow in Spring 2023
Judging the finalists, Carnegie Medal-Winning author Anthony McGowan said of Lost River:
“Lost River is an extraordinary work of art. It is a story of death and rebirth, borrowing from myth and fairy tale, but also conjuring up literary texts from Frankenstein and Dracula, from Southern Gothic to Magical Realism. Yet it remains entirely itself, not quite like anything else I’ve read. The prose is rich and delicate, the characters memorable, the story immersive. It has the feel of an instant classic.”
Publisher, Tobias Steed, commented, “in a year when we see the word unprecedented being overused, here we are in unprecedented times, we’ve had joint winners before but not from the same author. With anonymized judging anything is possible, and Anthony was pretty well evenly split on his appraisal of Faith’s entries. We could have had a casting vote for one or other of the titles, but truth be told, we want to publish both, and feel both deserve the accolade of winning the inaugural YA | MG category of the Leapfrog Global Fiction prize. Of Faith we now know the following. She is a previously published and award-winning poet. Shearin is the author of six previous books of poetry: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award); The Empty House; Moving the Piano; Telling the Bees; Orpheus; Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize); and Darwin’s Daughter. She has received awards from Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Recent work has been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. This is her first published fiction.
Lost River, 1918 will be published worldwide in August 2022 with the UK and US editions from TSB | Can of Worms and Leapfrog Press respectively, and Horse Latitudes will follow in the spring of 2023.
Anthony McGowan’s latest book is: I Am The Minotaur, and he won the 2020 Carnegie Medal for Lark.
The 2022 Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize will open for submissions this November.
