This years theme was Take a Stand
2019 Award Ceremony
On 27th March 2018 the annual SESTBA Gala Evening was held at Kent College.
The culmination of six months reading some really great books on the theme of “Taking a Stand”, this year’s SESTBA was our biggest yet. Once again it was a wonderful evening celebrating the joys of books and reading with trailers, competitions, dressing up, book signing & buying and two fabulous Guest Authors, Sita Brahmachari and Matt Killeen. For the first time we held a Creative Response competition which featured entries in an amazingly wide variety of mediums, from an incredible dress made from the folded pages of Tender Earth to poetry, models, collages and lots of fantastic cakes! The hotly contested winning books were Orphan Monster Spy in the Teen category and Moxie and Children of Blood and Bone in the Young Adult category (our first ever joint winners!).
Guest Authors
This year we were thrilled to have the company of acclaimed authors Sita Brahmachari and Matt Killeen. Sita enchanted us with stories of her father’s experiences of arriving in the UK as a young doctor and told us how she starts all her stories by doodling. She said “Writing is about what is flowing under the surface, not just the words on top”. Matt told us about how he was inspired to write Orphan Monster Spy by the war comics and films of his boyhood (and made us laugh with a photo of him as a little boy fast asleep with his toy gun and camo trousers!) He was amazed and delighted that Orphan Monster Spy was declared the winner of the Teen category and was thrilled to take the SESTBA Teen trophy home with him.
The shortlist and winners
Young Adult Books 2019
 | Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi |
 | Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu |
 | Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin |
 | Dear Martin by Nic Stone |
 | Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury |
Teen books 2019
 | Orphan Monster Spy by Matt Killeen |
 | The Wall by William Sutcliffe |
 | Hazel by Julie Hearn |
 | Flush by Carl Hiaasen |
 | Tender Earth by Sita Brahmachari |
Why don’t you join in the fun too?
We would love to welcome other South East secondary schools to our book award!
Pooling our ideas, experience, resources and enthusiasm is a great way to introduce reading for pleasure activities into your school
or take them to the next level.
Contact us via the link below if you would like to find out more about how to join in the fun.