WRITERS from the North East have swept the board in a national competition promoting cultural diversity in children’s fiction.

Helen Limon, winner of the Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children’s Book Award, lives in the village of Kirkheaton, Northumberland, while Karon Alderman, who was highly commended, lives in Newcastle.

Both submitted novels in manuscript form which publishing firm Frances Lincoln Ltd now has the option to publish.

The competition was set up by the publishing firm and Seven Stories, the centre for children’s books, to commemorate Frances Lincoln, who died a decade ago.

This is the third year of the competition but the first time it has produced a winner from the region.

At Seven Stories, where the award was presented yesterday, Ms Limon said a holiday in India two years ago provided the inspiration for her story which is called Om Shanti, Babe.

She said: “I found it an extraordinary place, but when I came back I suffered really badly from jet lag and was awake at four every morning.

“I had been making notes in India and I started to write this story. Within about a month I had a very bad draft of the complete novel.”

Helen, who was studying for a PhD in creative writing at Newcastle University, had been working on another novel as part of her course but had got bogged down in research.

“I took the draft of the new story to my supervisor and said, ‘I think I’d really love to develop this’.”

The story tells of a teenage girl called Cassia who accompanies her mother on a trip to India and is forced to drop a lot of her preconceived ideas.

It deals with issues such as fair trade and the environment but is also driven by Cassia’s struggle to accept her mother’s new Indian partner and her squabbles with fashion-mad Priyanka, with whom she eventually becomes friends.