A Fantastic Friday Launch for the Doncaster Book Award

Friday 8th October saw the launch of the seventh Doncaster Book Award at Doncaster’s Civic Theatre. What a spectacular start we had - our students were literally rocking in the aisles, much to the amazement and delight of the Civic Mayor and other distinguished guests, who could hardly believe that all this excitement was generated by reading!

To start us off this year, students from The Armthorpe School and Hexthorpe Primary took to the stage to perform a version of ‘Gotta Keep Reading’. This amazing routine is done to the music of the Black-Eyed Peas, but with new words that show the sheer enjoyment you can get from a book. All the audience members had been asked to bring along a book and join in, and the response was just incredible with hundreds of students and their teachers singing and dancing together. Check out the video (below) to see (and hear!) for yourself.

If you have access to YouTube, you can also view the video there.

Once the dancers were off the stage, and things had calmed down (slightly!), next up on stage was Lollipop Man himself, Phil Sheppard. Phil has a great new show out, called ‘Sheep Ahoy’, which he performed at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. He treated the Civic audience to one of his new poems from this, ‘The Princess and the Shark’, complete with illustrations. As ever, Phil’s humour was very well received, as was the news that he is doing a free workshop featuring his new material for the Book Award at ‘The Point’ arts venue in Doncaster in half term.

To follow Phil on stage we had the inimitable Chris Fitt, with her ‘gallop’ through this year’s longlist. Chris is a noted ‘Reading Enthuser’ and she spoke about all 20 titles, giving a brief synopsis of each. By the finish, I know everyone in the audience had at least one title they couldn’t wait to start reading. Again, the DBA have encouraged participating schools to invite Chris into their classrooms and kick start their participation for this year.

Then it was time for our star guest, the author Ali Sparkes, to get up on stage. Ali’s book Frozen in Time was shortlisted for last year’s Doncaster Book Award, and was incredibly popular. She has another book, Dark Summer, on this year’s long list. Ali spoke about how she’d always enjoyed writing, and had started to write stories while still at school. She talked of how she had tried lots of different types of writing, before her breakthrough with the publication of The Shapeshifter: Finding the Fox, but since then she has never looked back. The highlight so far was winning the 2010 Blue Peter Book of the Year Award with Frozen in Time. Ali had wanted to be a famous actor or singer, and never really expected to achieve fame through her writing, so it was a very pleasant surprise! Her talk, and the audience question and answer session which followed, revealed lots of funny and interesting facts about her books and her attitudes to reading, and could have gone on much longer, judging from the number of hands still up as we drew it to a close!

To finish off the event, by popular demand, we had a repeat of the ‘Gotta Keep Reading’ dance, and this time, if anything, the audience was even more excited and noisy! Everyone left on a high, and this year’s Doncaster Book Award has been well and truly launched!

Lyn Hopson, Secretary, Doncaster Book Award.

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