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Two Eye Books authors, George Harrison and Jim Cockin, are on the shortlists of the East Anglian Book Awards, announced today. Both published by our Lightning fiction imprint, they are finalists in different categories, which means they both could win.
Harrison is a finalist in the debut novel category with Season, his gently uplifiting study of loneliness and modern masculinity, in which two very different men form a slow, gradual bond in their adjacent season ticket seats in a Premier League football stadium.
Even though the team they support is not specified, Harrison himself is a diehard Norwich City fan and in-the-know readers may recognise parallels between the fortunes and personnel of the fictional team and those of the Canaries.
Season has been festooned with praise by sports lovers and literary critics alike. The commentator Jonathan Pearce calls it ‘a beautiful novel about the beautiful game’ while the Mail on Sunday hailed it as ‘a clever, heartfelt debut’.
Cockin’s debut novel Ghost Tide is shortlisted in the children’s book category. It’s a spooky spine-chiller for readers of nine and over about two young teenagers who battle to solve the mystery of the ‘box of souls’ which one of them has found buried on a windswept beach.
The novel is set on a remote part of the Suffolk coast. It’s a region Cockin knows well, having begun his career as a television journalist in East Anglia. Providing a happy balance, Jim is a passionate supporter of Ipswich Town (although football features only in passing in his book).
The children’s author Catherine Bruton calls Ghost Tide ‘a spookily spellbinding gothic ghost story which gripped me with an icy finger from the very first page and left me pale and breathless by the last’. Jules Button of the radio station Suffolk Sound described it as ‘bum-clenchingly exciting’.
Now in their eighteenth year, the East Anglian Book Awards are presented by the National Centre for Writing, based in Norwich, in partnership with the Eastern Daily Press. This year, eligibility has been widened to include books and writers from Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and all of Cambridgeshire, as well as Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and the fenland.
Peggy Hughes, the NCW’s CEO, said this represents a broader celebration of East Anglian writers and publishers than ever before, adding: ‘We are proud and delighted to present this year’s shortlists, confident that the tapestry of words and ideas emerging from our region is richer than ever.’
Category winners will be announced in January 2026. The overall Book of the Year will be named at a ceremony in Norwich on 12 February 2026.
