Suffolk Christian author shortlisted in awards

The book is a re-telling of the Bible for older children and teenagers and has spent many weeks in the Amazon bestsellers list, has sold over 6,000 copies and has recently been translated into German and Finnish.

 

Andrea (pictured right), who is an active member at St John's in Woodbridge, believes that her strong faith is vital to her work: "I wanted it to be a book that communicated God's love, that God loves and cares for people and wants to be involved in their lives.

"The Bible was written by people who believed in it. All the different books were by people who believed what they wrote. It's a book that's passionate and committed, so to try and rewrite it without that would be quite hard."

 

Andrea, at heart a poet, has overcome personal adversity, to become a best-selling author. At school she battled with dyslexia, spending much of the time staring out of the window and daydreaming. However, it was then, drawing on these daydreams, that she began to write long, badly spelled stories of heroism and bravery in secret notebooks. 

 

Loving stories, she found books that inspired her to read.  With the help of thoughtful and original teachers in secondary school, she went on to defeat her early problems and graduate from Cambridge with a degree in English Literature. 

 

With seven other publications, all still in print, Lion approached her in 2007 asking her to produce a re-telling of the Bible in 12 chapters focusing on it as a continuous story in 55,000 words.  Andrea's reaction of 'why me?' received the reply from Lion, 'because you are not afraid!' 

 

It is with this boldness that Andrea approached the daunting task of what to include and what to leave out, having been given an academic year to come up with a manuscript. She started by reading, often several versions of the Bible and then began to write.

 

She said: “I loved it, immersing myself in the Bible, I learnt so much. I was only able to do this prayerfully and felt led by God.”

 

Having achieved this first goal, she submitted it to Lion and the process of editing began. For a full year Andrea heard nothing more, but in that time Lion were having the script beautifully and sympathetically illustrated by Sophy Williams.

 

The Bible was published last March and in now it has been shortlisted in the Ultimate Christian Book Awards for Children up to aged 18.

 

The Awards are now at the public voting stage until March, visit:  www.christianbookawards.org