Essex author in line for Romantic Novel Awards nod

07 Feb Essex author in line for Romantic Novel Awards nod

Novelist Kate Johnson from Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex, has been shortlisted for the 2017 RoNAs (Romantic Novel Awards) in the brand new Paranormal or Speculative Romantic Novel category and could go forward to contest the overall, most prestigious, award – The Goldsboro Books’ Romantic Novel of the Year 2017, sponsored by independent specialist bookshop Goldsboro Books.

Prue Leith, restaurateur, caterer, journalist, broadcaster, cookery writer and author, will announce the winners of the Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) Awards for 2017 during a glittering ceremony in London on 13th March.

The awards comprise seven categories – Contemporary Romantic Novel, Epic Romantic Novel, Historical Romantic Novel, Paranormal or Speculative Romantic Novel, Romantic Comedy Novel, the RoNA Rose Award (for shorter and category romance) and Young Adult Romantic Novel – with a range of authors shortlisted for each one. For the first time in the awards’ history the shortlist includes both traditionally and independently published authors.

Kate Johnson is one of four finalists in the newly introduced Paranormal or Speculative Romantic Novel category, which features romantic novels that include elements beyond the range of scientific explanation, whether paranormal, fantasy, science fiction, time slip or worlds that include ghosts, vampires or creatures of legend.

Her novel, Max Seventeen, which was independently published, is set in space, on a small cargo spaceship and various invented planets and moons, as well as on a rogue planet devoid of sunlight, covered with water and islands made of abandoned cruise ship, a highly-advanced city where people wear deliberately outrageous fashions and a hidden compound on a sparsely inhabited moon. The novel also features the starship Eurydice; small, old, constantly in need of repair, and home to a band of misfits, runaways and pirates.

Kate is one of the first self-published authors to be shortlisted in the awards, as this is the first year that independently published novels have been included.