JERICHO PRIZE
Meet Fabia Turner the Founder of the Jericho Prize
What inspired you to create the Jericho Prize and what do you hope putting this amazing opportunity out there will achieve for black authors and society as a whole?
My son was my main inspiration. Since he was born, six years ago, I’ve been on a constant hunt for quality Black children’s books to ensure he’s exposed to broad, rich reading experiences reflecting his own dual ethnicity and culture, as well as those of other communities. I was a primary school teacher earlier in my career, and back then I would always strive to find truly representative books. Cut to today, looking for suitable books for my son, I soon realised this is more of a struggle now for many reasons, the main one being not enough inclusive children’s books are being published in the UK.
The Centre for Primary Literacy in Education’s 2020 report showed that ‘in 2019, 33.5% of primary school-aged children were of minority ethnic origins, but only 5% of children’s books published contained ethnic minority main characters’. This data highlights the urgent need for more books featuring authentic characters of colour — particularly for younger readers — and I’ve chosen to focus on books with Black-main characters by Black-British authors to support progress in this area.
The Jericho Prize will offer emerging Black-British writers a safe space to craft and showcase their writing for children and, hopefully, the exposure will lead to them becoming published authors. I would like the competition to raise people’s awareness of the amazing Black writing talent that we have in the UK.
I also want Black-British children to see themselves reflected realistically in the books they read. Reading more books by Black-British authors may even inspire them to one day become authors too. We urgently need more Black publishing professionals as well!
What made you pick the two categories authors can enter their work for?
Although things are improving slowly, there are still not many contemporary Black-British authors writing for younger children and we need to increase the number and variety of Black voices in this category. I chose to focus on picture books because I noticed that many self-published Black writers were making them but were struggling to get their books noticed or critiqued. There are a handful of Black-British authors writing short chapter books for 7–9s (I can think of three off the top of my head), but we need a variety of writers from the diaspora bringing more own-voice stories into the mix.
Next time, we’ll focus on 5–7 early chapter books as this area desperately needs attention.
Books are part of so many lives, however we often only ever see and feel the finished product in our hands — but there are so many areas that go into creating a finished product. What has gone into creating the Jericho Prize behind the scenes?
There’s a huge amount of background work involved in running a UK-wide writing competition that people don’t see. It’s like a full-time job a lot of the time, particularly as we’re unknown and need to build our following. The project-management side is massive and we’re more than just a prize, so there’s tonnes of extra creative and editorial work involved as well as the day-to-day project management and administration. Also, there’s a mentoring aspect to our prize, so we’ve created a wealth of free resources that writers can access via our website and YouTube channel and we are adding to this on a regular basis.
Fundraising is another huge part of making the project happen. For me it was important to ensure both winners receive a cash prize as part of their award, so I was thrilled when Black-led indie publisher Knights Of offered to fund this. Applying for and achieving support from the Arts Council of England has enabled us to make the competition free to enter and to pay the creatives who have contributed content to our website, which I’m really chuffed about.
Commissioning and briefing authors and editors to create content is a large part of the work (I write a lot of the content as well). Marketing and promotion on social media take up a huge amount of time but we need to do it to raise our profile and engage with the wider writing community and book industry.
The biggest element, judging, is yet to come in August and will run right through till January 2022. This will entail 100s of hours spent reading manuscripts and lots of administrative tasks. I am so grateful to all our readers and judges who have volunteered their time to help us with this mammoth task and I’m also excited to see what submissions we get. After all of that, we’ll have the award ceremony to organise in January plus the mentoring element of the prize which kicks off in February.
You have great experience working in education and with young people, what do you think is key to writing a great children's book?
Less is more. Not everything needs to be described at length in massive books. I’m not a great fan of tomes for children under 10 as is the trend in certain genres since the Harry Potter series. Of course, there are confident readers who will always relish the challenge of longer books, but for the average child living in our fast-paced digital age I think targeting big novels at children might impress upon them an expectation to behave like ‘accomplished’ adult readers. I always wonder how much of these texts they fully comprehend, and whether long books switch off a love of reading for specific children.
For example, my son is six and is reading around two years above his peers and he has always voraciously read books of his own choosing. That’s until recently when his teacher has told him he ‘must’ read lengthy chapter books. He gets so upset saying ‘the books are just too long or too hard’, is now refusing to read, and I see his love of reading dwindling. Just because he can read all the words on the pages, it doesn’t mean he needs longer books all the time. Instead, I read the chapter books to him, he dips in when he wants to, and he thoroughly enjoys that right now. He also has a wide range of appropriate reading material available to him at home, from picture books to novels, magazines to factual books and it’s up to him when and where he chooses to read longer material independently.
Essentially what I’m saying is, the quality of what you write is much more important than the quantity. Think about characters’ actions and feelings and, especially for picture books, consider how illustrations can contribute to imparting information so it doesn’t have to always be spelled out in the text. The best books are those where an author really gets how children see the world, that connect deeply with them, capturing their imaginations eternally. These are the books you’ll never tire of reading aloud and children will never tire of listening to them.
Submissions are open
2nd August - 2 September 2021
Apply via www.jerichoprize.com
INSTAGRAM @jericoprize
TWITTER @JerichoPrize
