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Awards and prizes

Frances Hardinge has been shortlisted for and won various awards for her writing.

Frances has been nominated for the 2022 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award!

Unraveller won the 'Best Book for Young Readers' category of the British Science Fiction Awards 2022!

All the details are here.

Frances has been nominated for the 2021 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award!

It is an international literature prize awarded to those who continue to work in Astrid Lindgren's spirit: with imagination, bravery, respect and empathy, and maintaining the highest degree of artistic excellence. The list includes some of the world's foremost creators of literature for children and young people, as well as reading promoters.

A Skinful of Shadows has won the Dracula Society's 'Children of the Night' award!

The Children of the Night Award is awarded by The Dracula Society annually. Nominations are invited from members at the beginning of every year for the best original fiction published in the Gothic (including horror or supernatural) genre during the previous year.

Frances is appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature!

"A society of, and for, writers. At the heart of the RSL is its Fellowship, which encompasses the most distinguished authors working in the English language. We build bridges between our Fellows and the reading public, so that their talents are shared as widely as possible."

The Lie Tree wins the UKLA Book Awards 12–16 years category!

"The judges said they were impressed by the 'brilliant powerful language of Frances Hardinge's wholly compelling, dark mystery'. 'The perfectly portrayed Victorian period with the themes of science, religion and the role of women stimulated really interesting class discussion. Despite the fantastically weird story of the Lie Tree itself, this is an intensely human novel with young readers able to really relate to Faith and feel her anger and frustration and her growing realization of parental fallibility.'" More here.

The Lie Tree wins the YA Category of the LA Times Book Prizes 2017!

In his opening remarks, Times Editor and Publisher Davan Maharaj said the responsibility of writers is to be relentless, expose hypocrisy, speak truth to power and to "capture in our prose and poetry" the state of the world.

The Lie Tree wins the 2016 Boston Globe / Horn Book Fiction Award!

"It’s heady stuff; but Hardinge maintains masterful control of the whole complex construct: everything from the sentence level (“The boat moved with a nauseous, relentless rhythm, like someone chewing on a rotten tooth”) on up to the larger philosophical and political (i.e., feminist – the revelation of the book’s villain is … a revelation) questions. A stunner," said Martha V Parravano, of Horn Book.

The Lie Tree wins the overall Costa Book of the Year award 2015!

Frances's latest novel first pipped fellow shortlistees Sally Nicholls, Hayley Long and Andrew Norriss to the Costa Children's Book prize, and then went forward to be chosen ahead of works by Andrew Michael Hurley, Kate Atkinson, Andrea Wulf and Don Paterson for the overall award. Read about it here, and watch Frances's acceptance speech – in which she talks about the 'beautiful jungle' of YA fiction – here!

The 2015 British Fantasy Award – Cuckoo Song wins!

Frances' sixth novel, Cuckoo Song, won the prestigious Robert Holdstock Award for Best Novel, presented by the British Fantasy Society at FantasyCon 2015. Here's an article in The Guardian about it!

Frances later tweeted: “I am informed that, when my name was read out, my look of shock was highly comic. (I still keep double-checking the name on the award).”

The Branford Boase award 2006

The Branford Boase Award is awarded annually for the most promising first novel to a first-time writer of a book for young people. At the same time, it marks the important contribution of the editor in identifying and nurturing new talent.

Frances won the award in 2006 for Fly By Night and, in her acceptance speech, she noted the contributions of three editors: Rebecca McNally, Marion Lloyd and Ruth Alltimes.

Other awards and listings