Rachel Delahaye's 'Electric Life' longlisted for Yoto Carnegie Award for Writing
The Yoto Carnegies, the UK’s longest running and best loved book awards for children and young people, have announced their longlists for 2024. We’re thrilled that Rachel Delahaye’s novel Electric Life is longlisted for the Award for Writing.
Rachel is no stranger to the Award, having previously been nominated in 2023 for her powerful novel Day of the Whale, which thrillingly combines fast-paced adventure with urgent contemporary themes such as climate change and fake news.
Electric Life is equally inspired by current issues and is in a set in a fictional yet believable future in a city named Estrella. Estrella is the ‘perfect’ society: an immaculate, sanitised, hyper-connected environment where everything is channelled through the digital medium. There’s no dirt, no pain, no disease and no natural world. But teenage Alara Tripp is about to discover another reality: thanks to her gaming skills she is chosen to go on a dangerous mission to ‘London Under’, the long-deserted and distrusted city on top of which Estrella was built. How will Alara survive in a society where noise, dirt and sometimes pain are everyday experiences - but where food is not synthetic and tastes… real?
A total of 36 books have been longlisted for the Awards from 20 different publishers; 19 for the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing, and 18 for the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration.
The Yoto Carnegies celebrate outstanding reading experiences in books for children and young people. The Awards are unique in being judged by librarians, and aim to spark a lifelong passion for reading by connecting more children with books that will change lives.
The shortlists for the 2024 Yoto Carnegies will be announced at a panel event at London Book Fair beginning on Wednesday 13 March. The winners’ ceremony will be hosted live and streamed on Thursday 20 June.
In the meantime, discover more about Electric Life in the trailer below and at www.troikabooks.com/electric-life.