Lancashire Book of the Year winners

2024 winner

The winner of Lancashire Book of the Year 2024 was The Midnight Game, seeing author Cynthia Murphy astonishingly winning for the third year in a row.

Cynthia also becomes the first author to have won the award three times in its 38 year history!

The winning book, The Midnight Game, tells the story of a group of six strangers from an online forum who decide to meet in real life with one plan in mind: they are going to summon the Midnight Man. And once you start the Midnight Game, you must finish it - there's no other way out! Six strangers. One night. But how many survivors?

Cynthia was unfortunately unable to attend the awards ceremony at UCLan due to illness, but after being named winner said:

"Thank you so much – I'm thrilled that you loved The Midnight Game and I am absolutely over the moon to have won the Lancashire Book of the Year for the third year in a row!

"When I saw this year’s list I immediately gave up hope that I would retain my title - I mean, have you seen it? There are so many fabulous books written by wonderful, talented people on there, and then little old me with another one of my weird and creepy books."

Previous winners

The first winner, when the Lancashire Book of the Year launched in 1987, was Philip Pullman, who went on to have great success with the His Dark Materials trilogy.

Other winning authors include Malorie Blackman, Anthony Horowitz and Sarah Crossan.

You can see a list of all previous Lancashire Book of the Year winners on Wikipedia.