Cece wins 2017 Text Prize

Adelaide-based author Adam Cece has won the 2017 Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing for his middle-grade manuscript ‘The Extremely Weird Thing That Happened in Huggabie Falls’.

The ‘laugh-out-loud madcap adventure’ about three friends who live in ‘the weirdest town in the world’ was chosen from a shortlist of four and more than 300 entries. As the winner, Cece will receive a $10,000 advance as well as a publishing contract with Text, with the three other shortlisted authors also receiving book deals with the publisher.

Cece, who previously published his junior-fiction novel Wesley Booth, Super Sleuth with Scholastic in 2015, said, ‘I am so honoured to have won the Text Prize in its tenth amazing year, and humbled to be in such a good company. The whole team at Text is so passionate and so good at what they do.’

‘It’s hard to imagine how this delightful book won’t charm the socks off its readers,’ said Text publisher Michael Heyward about the winner. ‘This book is a crash course in Dutch werewolves, vegetarian piranhas and crazy street names. It’s a particular pleasure to publish a book that will make its readers—children and grown-ups alike—happy. We can’t wait to tell the whole publishing world, both in Australia and internationally, about Huggabie Falls and its inhabitants, who are so crazy even they find each other weird.’

Text will publish The Extremely Weird Thing That Happened in Huggabie Falls in 2018. Last year’s winning entry, Claire Christian’s Beautiful Mess, will be published in September 2017.

Category: Junior Local news