We are delighted to announce the new judging panel for the Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children's Book Award 2013

Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty (The National Council for Civil Liberties), and Alex Wheatle MBE, the award-winning British novelist of Jamaican heritage, have joined the judging panel for the 2013 Award.

Frances Lincoln Ltd, the award winning publisher, and Seven Stories, the national centre for children's books, are proud to announce the Diverse Voices Award 2013 in memory of Frances Lincoln (1945-2001), to encourage and promote diversity in children's fiction.

The Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children's Book Award is for a manuscript that celebrates cultural diversity in the widest possible sense, either in terms of its story or the ethnic and cultural origins of its author.

The prize of £1,500, plus the option for Janetta Otter-Barry at Frances Lincoln Children's Books to publish the novel, will be awarded to the best work of unpublished fiction for 8-to-12-year-olds by a writer, aged 18 years or over, who has not previously published a novel for children. The writer may have contributed to an anthology of prose or poetry. The work must be written in English and it must be a minimum of 15,000 words and a maximum of 35,000 words.

(l-r) Helen Limon (2011 winner) Tom Avery (2010 winner – Too Much Trouble is published today) and Karon Alderman (2011 runner up)

The Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children's Book Award aims to:

Take positive steps to increase the representation of people writing from or about different cultural perspectives, whose work is published in Britain today

Promote new writing for children, especially by or about people whose culture and voice are currently under-represented

Recognise that as children's books shape our earliest perceptions of the world and its cultures, promoting writing that represents diversity will contribute to social and cultural tolerance

Support the process of writing rather than, as with the majority of prizes, promoting the publication

The closing date for all entries is 31st December 2012

For more details visit
www.sevenstories.org.uk

Email diversevoices@sevenstories.org.uk or telephone 0845 271 0777