Jim Cockin’s poltergeist spine-chiller Ghost Tide has won the Mal Peet Children’s Book Award, the category of the East Anglian Book Awards which honours the best children’s books set in or written by authors living in East Anglia.
Published by Lightning in 2024, the former TV journalist’s debut novel is set on a remote part of the Suffolk coast. It features two young teenagers battling to solve the mystery of the ‘box of souls’ which one of them has found buried on a windswept beach.
The novel will now go forward to the contest for the awards’ overall Book of the Year, which will be named at a ceremony in Norwich on 12 February 2026.
The children’s award is named after Mal Peet, the author and illustrator whose books included Tamar, winner of the 2005 Carnegie Medal, and who died in 2015. Notable previous winners are Ashley Hickson-Lovence’s Wild East and Mitch Johnson’s Spark.
Also in the running at the East Anglian Book Awards this year was George Harrison’s Season, the story of a slow-build friendship in the stands of a football stadium, which was shortlisted in the debut novels category.