Monday 18^th April saw the Haringey Children’s Book Award Ceremony, and our Year 7 Award group had a wonderful day at Heartlands High School, along with over 200 students from primary and secondary schools around the borough.  We had a private workshop with shortlisted author Polly Ho-Yen (The Boy in the Tower) who got us to delve into the compost of our brains to think about events in our lives that could be used in apocalyptic stories!  Then after lunch we got to meet  not only some of the shortlisted authors (SF Said, Polly and Philip Womack), but also other authors who came to be part of this celebration of books and reading, including Piers Torday, Emer Stamp, Jonny Zucker, Matt Brown, Daniel Whelan, Karen McCombie and  Gill Lewis (last year’s winner).  Catherine West MP talked encouragingly about libraries and voting, an author panel took amazingly mature and sensible questions from the audience and the Big Green Bookshop was swamped by excited students (and teachers and librarians) buying books to get signed!  The student votes were counted.  Fortismere is especially proud that the winner was our very own Patron of Reading, SF Said, with his book Phoenix.  Hurrah!