Lancashire Book of the Year winners

2025 winner

The winner of Lancashire Book of the Year 2025 was Lie Or Die by A. J. Clack, a nail-biting reality-TV based young adult thriller described as being perfect for fans of The Traitors.

Year 9 pupils from 35 high schools took part in the judging process, with representation from across the whole of Lancashire as well as Blackpool. The young judges started with a long list of 96 young adult fiction books, narrowing that down to a shortlist of 12 titles. The judges were then tasked with selecting the winner, which was done via a confidential vote in June 2025.

 A.J. Clack said: "It's hard to express how much it means to me to have young adults read Lie or Die and enjoy it enough to vote it the winner. That it resonated with them as readers means the world.

"To have such an overwhelmingly positive response from the very people you were writing for is the best validation a writer can have.

"I am so grateful and honoured to have been judged the winner of this prestigious award, from such an amazing shortlist of books and would like to thank each student judge for their vote and their support."

 Lie Or Die tells the story of a group of ten strangers trapped in a TV studio as they try to uncover the traitorous agent in a fight for survival. The book has been compared to the hit reality BBC TV show, The Traitors, where contestants play a game of detection, backstabbing, and trust.

Both Lie Or Die and The Traitors are based on the popular murder-mystery party game Mafia, also known as Werewolf, a social deduction game created in 1986 by Dimitry Davidoff.

"It was amazing to compare how we had both independently interpreted the original Mafia game into a story format. It was a real Zeitgeist moment," A. J. Clack said.

"It's interesting to see how the show introduced a Detective character into later seasons – I wonder whether Lie or Die was an influence for them!"

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.