The Impossible Story of Hannah Kemp

Description

The unpublished manuscript was the winner of the 2022 Tessa Duder Award: a powerful exploration of guilt, forgiveness, choice and personal responsibility. Hannah Kemp is dealing with a traumatic accident for which she was responsible. Struggling to come to terms with her guilt, she is ostracized in a community that condemns her. She deals with this by rebelling and pushing away anyone that offers kindness or seeks to understand her. Crippled by her own guilt and anger, she comes across a mobile library bus where every book is the true story of someone's life, and realizes that judgement of others is almost always shallow and uninformed. When she finds her own book ... she also finds that her past can reshape her present.

Leonie Agnew is an award-winning children's author, a former advertising copywriter, and currently moonlighting as a primary school teacher. Witnesses claim her defining characteristic is a tendency to make things up. This is called lying, unless you write it down. Then it is pleasantly referred to as being an author. In 2022, Leonie won the junior fiction prize at the New Zealand Book Awards for the second time. She also won the Storylines 2022 Tessa Duder Award for her manuscript The Impossible Story of Hannah Kemp. Leonie has previously won the British David Fickling Master of the Inkpot prize, multiple Esther Glen awards, a national children's choice award and more. All this must be true because somebody else wrote it on her Wikipedia page, not Leonie.